Throughout Qvidian’s nearly 50 years of industry experience, we’ve watched as new technologies emerge and quickly strengthen and enrich the proposal process. From the early days of automation to the rise of cloud-based software and native integrations, we’ve had a front-row seat to innovation taking place continuously throughout the industry. 

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), has been a whirlwind with an enormous impact easily exceeding other technological advancements in the industry. AI advancement has caused such a quick and immediate transformation to the automation of sales documents that start with identifying a prospect to closing the opportunity. This starts with creating presentation ready persuasive proposals, to building RFP responses that are more dynamic and relevant to the request. In just a few years, we’ve watched the industry (and the larger software world) explode with new products, features, and tools all using the power of generative AI. 

Organizations face many challenges when implementing AI. Whether it is dealing with security concerns or to democratizing buy-in across multiple dispersed teams, organizations must tackle these challenges head-on as they adopt AI into their current processes. The easiest way to accomplish this is by partnering with trusted organizations and doing the hard internal work to break down silos, quash AI myths and rumors, and build dedicated cross-functional team approaches to generative AI. 

The core challenges of adopting AI

When designing our AI Adoption in Proposal Management Trends and Observations report, we broke down the core challenges of adopting AI into three areas: 

1. Challenges faced by IT security, corporate legal, and compliance teams 
2. Challenges faced by Procurement teams 
3. Organizational and cultural challenges 

We wanted to get a broad understanding of how AI implementation differs across departments, teams, and organizations. Our initial hunch was the challenges an IT team faces would be vastly different than those of a procurement team or an individual team of proposal writers and managers. The results from our report highlighted the nuances of implementing new technology while also explaining the varying (and often competing) needs individual teams face within an organization-wide adoption of AI. 

Security, privacy, and regulatory compliance 

When we surveyed the challenges faced by IT security, corporate legal, and compliance teams, the primary challenge they faced implementing AI was data security and privacy. In a fully digital world organizations take data security seriously, this is especially true for the bids and proposal industry where many organizations regularly work within finance, technology, and healthcare industries with strict regulatory rules. 

Equally challenging was the ownership of intellectual property. Many organizations struggle to find a supplier who will keep their content secure and won’t use it to train future versions of AI models. This is a big challenge for organizations who understand that maintaining a competitive advantage, in a field that increasingly relies on persuasive content to make the final sell, relies on having better content than competitors. Additionally, organizations facing strict regularly and compliance guidelines simply cannot allow any AI model to access sensitive or protected data, making any supplier that does a non-starter. 

Costs, supplier selection, compatibility and ROI

Many organizations don’t make buying decisions on a whim. When it comes to organization-wide software, tools, or hardware, they often rely on procurement teams to research all the necessary details, ironing out the best possible solution before making the final purchasing decision. 

These teams and departments ranked cost and budget constraints as their number one challenge to implementing AI. Nearly every company battles over budget and adopting organization-wide software like AI can be a costly expenditure if not approached carefully. Supplier selection along with integration and compatibility were equally challenging for these teams understand that simply having AI is meaningless if it doesn’t seamlessly integrate into your existing workflows or key communication tools.  

Finally, procurement teams are concerned about the overall return on investment of any AI product. It’s not enough to simply save time on responses, AI models need to have a proven boost to ROI to make them enticing to both management and individual contributors.  

AI Literacy, resistance to change, and communication

Lastly, as we looked at organization-wide implementation and adoption of AI, three challenges rose to the top: AI literacy, resistance to change, and communication. 

As an industry-pioneer in the proposal automation space none of these shocked us. In fact, these are the same challenges any company faces when adopting new technology or software. Team members who lack information on the newly proposed technology often feel hesitant to adopt it. Meanwhile, those responsible for implementing the new technology often lack clear methods of communication and collaboration.  

To combat this, organizations should focus on building up AI literacy and clearly communicating its benefits to their teams. Training sessions, webinars, roundtable discussions, and AI steering committees are all great ways of boosting overall communication and helping the entire organization feel included in the final decision. Just the same, suppliers should factor in implementation when providing AI solutions. Working with organizations to develop a clearly defined implementation schedule can be the key factor to organization-wide adoption of AI. 

AI Trend Report Download

This software-agnostic report shows results and observations from fellow industry professionals on the biggest challenges, trends, and outcomes related to AI implementation. By examining these industry trends, we spotlight the areas where AI drives real transformation and growth while addressing professionals’ real-world concerns during AI implementation.

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Building AI tools that make work meaningful

At Qvidian, we’re dedicated to building the very best complementary generative AI tools for our users that create even more efficiency and personalization. We want tools that not only work well, but also enhance our users’ productivity and deliver consistent, compliant, individualized and responsive proposals that are critical to winning business. Our goal is to be the trusted advisor to our customers teams across industries, mitigate these challenges, and overcome the obstacles to AI implementation. 

The Qvidian team will do this by providing superior tools built on user feedback and research that are delivered and supported by internal centers of excellence with a rich understanding of the industry. By studying industry trends we’re helping to drive the future of emerging AI technologies, including generative and agentic, that positively influence and drive increased value to automating sales documents from persuasive proposals to completion of due-diligence questionnaires, including RFPs. In short, our goal is to continue to provide best-of-breed tools and technologies that help professionals everywhere save time and win more.