AI strategy, then an internal build that speeds up RFP responses

The situation

A consulting business answers RFPs for a living, and the quality of an answer depends on finding the right people and the most relevant past work fast. At Knowit Cloud & Code that meant searching across roughly a thousand consultant CVs and a history of delivered projects, under deadline, by people who could not possibly hold all of it in their heads. The wider question was where AI belonged across the business, for internal productivity and for what they offer clients.

What we did

Strategy first, then a deliberately chosen first build.

• AI strategy with leadership: an AI playbook covering both internal productivity and customer offerings.
• Use case discovery and prioritization, so the first build was chosen rather than defaulted to.
• Inspiration and enablement sessions for a wider audience, so the strategy was not held by five people.
• Leading an internal development team through building the RFP matchmaker: a tool that matches an incoming RFP against the consultant CV and project database, so the team responding starts from candidates rather than from a blank search.

Why the RFP matchmaker was the right first build

It sat squarely on the first path to AI value, boosting productivity in a workflow the business already understood and already measured. The data existed. The owner was obvious. The result was visible to the people doing the work within one RFP cycle. Choosing a first build with those four properties is most of what determines whether an AI program gets a second one.

What changed

A small team of salespeople now matches consultants to an incoming RFP in a few hours. The same work used to take about a week. The larger change is what stopped happening: answering an RFP no longer means sending a question to fifty team managers to find out who is available and who fits. The search runs against the database rather than against fifty people’s attention, which is the part that had a real cost and never appeared on any budget line.