What's an AI Proposal Manager?

Proposal work has come a long way from printed papers and folder organization. Great tools like Loopio and Qvidian revolutionized the industry, empowering thousands of companies to speed up and refine their RFP processes. Today, the RFP tools are undergoing another drastic evolution and taking things to another level.

This shift matters because RFPs are only growing in number and complexity. In 2025, 61% of organizations say they'll submit more RFPs than last year—and over 44% are investing in technology to streamline these efforts^1,2. Meanwhile, early adopters of AI in RFPs have seen response times drop by 30–40% and teams handling double the volume³.

Enter: the AI Proposal Manager. An AI Proposal Manager isn’t just software—it’s your intelligent teammate automating and optimizing every part of the proposal process. Instead of tedious manual workflows, you can now focus on what truly matters - skipping repetitive tasks and streamlining your entire proposal process

What makes a Great AI Proposal Manager?

Intelligent answer generation is now standard in most AI-powered RFP tools. There are also some industry-standard criteria that everyone is looking for when they are integrating with an RFP tool:

• Smart content reuse: Automatically suggest relevant answers based on your previous submissions, saving you from reinventing the wheel each time.

• An integrated knowledge base that is automatically updated with every new RFP - think a structured content hub instead of scattered in docs and emails

• Intelligent search and traceability. Instead of trying to find that one answer from an RFP 10 months ago that you know you submitted, you can just search for a question, and a good platform will be able to find similar ones from all the past proposals

Here's where the true AI Proposal Manager differentiation happens, though:

• Act as an intelligent teammate - if you have a question about any RFPs, they should be able to easily answer it from a platform where you are used to asking those questions

• Proactively try to fill out a draft and flag questions that it's unsure of - now instead of coming up with hallucinated content, a good platform will know when the answer has low confidence and will raise to appropriate people

• Identify gaps in its knowledge base and proactively reach out to subject-matter experts, constantly updating its content

• AI transparency - generated answers shouldn't be a black box; being able to trace the content to every piece of human-written knowledge that went into its compilation is a must

Don't accept a chatbot or a text generation tool. The best AI proposal tools act like co-pilots, helping, learning, and adapting to your workflows.

Why ChatGPT or Claude Aren't Enough

If you're thinking "why can't I just use ChatGPT for this" - awesome, you're already ahead of the curve! In fact, you can use ChatGPT and will likely get some good results with it with some prompt tweaking (see here for some tips). Whether or not you want to move with ChatGPT or a specialized proposal tool depends on your goals.

If you are aiming to speed up only your writing process, ChatGPT or similar platforms might be a good fit. They are able to create excellent first drafts from the content you give them. Note that you would still need to conduct your normal review process - as the quality of answers still will not be at the human level. While ChatGPT is an excellent tool, it, unfortunately, lacks awareness of your specific process and structure. All other parts of the workflow - from ingestion to review to submission - would still need be done manually; furthermore, you actually become bottlenecked as only one person at a time can generate and edit the responses. Using tools like this will not facilitate your review process or help you with collaboration.

If you are looking instead to optimize every stage of your process, not just the drafting one, it might be time to look for an AI proposal manager - which can help you speed up every step of the flow, while still fitting in with your existing processes.

Simply put, great teams don't just need another writer who shaves a few hours off drafting. What they need is an intelligent teammate that can help at every stage of the process - from ingestion, to collaboration, review, and finally tracking the success of the deals. And generic AI tools simply lack the structure and integration to step into that role effectively.

AI Proposal Managers In the Wild

If you are now convinced you need a proposal management platform, you might get overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. There are a lot of great tools out there - but we went ahead and gather a couple we think are truly great.

Settle

Of course, we are a little biased here, but we really do believe what we are building is an incredible improvement over manual workflows. In fact, we recently helped one of our clients in the catering industry reduce their RFP response times by up to 80%.

Here are a few of the things we are really proud of:

• You can automatically ingest every RFP you get by drag-n-dropping it into the platform - and we'll automatically extract all the questions and the context

• Our AI agent automatically drafts initial answers for every RFP, significantly cutting your response time. For each answer it generates, you are able to see exactly which data from the knowledge library it's based on - and easily refine every answer with your custom instructions right there in the platform

• Settle makes it easy to collaborate on an RFP and tag your teammates whenever you are not sure about something or want an additional review

• Once you're done, we will export the RFP to you in the exact format it came in

We are also currently testing a new feature in beta: proactive knowledge gathering and flagging. If our agent is unable to answer a question or is unsure about something, it will automatically find missing knowledge gaps and automatically route questions to subject-matter experts from your team. All they have to do is answer a question in Slack - and our agent will proactively update the library and the answer with the new knowledge! If you are interested in beta testing this, please reach out to us at [email protected] or book a demo!

Ideal for: fast-moving & innovative teams looking to massively speed up their RFP workflows.

Responsive

Another great tool, with a significant market presence and proven traction. They have also recently introduced their AI features, and integrate well in a variety of sectors (including InfoSec, IT, and marketing).

Ideal for: large enterprises needing control.

PandaDoc

An excellent tool if you are looking for a more visual experience when crafting your RFPs. For industries where deals are made or broken based on how the RFP looks, this is a great tool. They also boast a variety of software integrations and even provide a custom API.

Ideal for: Ideal for teams needing visually impressive proposals.

Inventive.ai

Inventive is one of the few innovators in the market to provide an AI agent. Their area of expertise is connecting to your existing data sources (like Google Drive) and an agent that continuously improves the quality of the responses. They differentiate from other tools in the market because they are an AI-first platform.

Ideal for: Ideal for data-driven teams looking for continuous improvement via AI.

How to Decide - and Actually Win More RFPs

Here's a rough step-by-step process:

1. Figure out your exact pain point and goal - match the tool to optimize the processes you struggle the most with.

2. The market is shifting towards autonomous AI-powered RFP solutions, which consistently deliver better results than traditional, non-AI platforms. It's important to think about your ideal workflows holistically, not just in the context of one single bottleneck.

3. See real-world ROI. Ask vendors for case studies and benchmarks.

4. The ideal scenario is a vendor who's nimble and is willing to work with you on your problem. The market is evolving so fast that you have to innovate quickly as well - and the best way to do that is with tools that evolve with you.

TL;DR

AI is more than a buzzword - it’s how proposal teams stay competitive in 2025. But not all AI is created equal. Choose a tool that does more than just generate text - one that streamlines your content, workflows, and team collaboration. You'll win faster, more consistently, and with less stress.

Curious about Settle or just want to vent about how frustrating RFPs can be? We're here to listen. Just book a demo or drop us a quick email - we'd love to hear from you!