Can you just use ChatGPT to write tender responses?
· 7 min read
Yes. Or Claude. Or Copilot. Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral and the growing number of other AI tools out there.
They are all capable of helping with a tender. Give a decent model the right documents and instructions and it can analyse an ITT, pull out requirements, help structure a response, find gaps in what you have written and generally save quite a lot of time.
So why would you need something like BidMate? It is a reasonable question, particularly when many businesses already have access to one or more of these tools.
The answer is not that BidMate has some secret AI that nobody else can access. It does not. BidMate currently uses Gemini as its core language model, partly because it is particularly good at working across different types of documents and information. That may change as the technology changes.
The model is not really the point. The interesting question is what you ask it to do.
You could build your own AI bidding system
If you wanted to use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or another general AI tool for bidding, there is a fairly sensible way to go about it. It probably would not start with: "Here is the ITT. Write me a winning bid."
Before writing anything, give it the procurement documents and get it to work out what you are actually dealing with. What are the questions? How are they scored? What are the weightings? Are there pass/fail requirements? Word limits? Mandatory commitments? Particular pieces of evidence the buyer expects to see?
Get it to analyse the specification alongside the questions rather than treating each question in isolation. Then give it information about your business: previous responses, case studies, policies, CVs, accreditations, performance figures, delivery processes and examples of things you have actually done.
If the evidence is not there, flag the gap. Do not make something up to fill it.
AI is extremely good at producing plausible prose. In bidding, plausible is not enough. A beautifully written account of your mobilisation process is worse than useless if it describes a process your business does not actually use.
BidMate gives you one place to organise tender documents, evidence and response work before you ask AI to help with the writing. Start managing your bids
There is more to do before writing anything
Look at the buyer. What are they trying to achieve? What are they worried about? What can you learn from their strategies, previous contracts, published priorities and the language they have used in the tender?
Then ask whether you should be bidding at all. Do you meet the requirements? Where are you genuinely strong? Where are you weak? Do you have the evidence? Can you actually deliver what is being asked for? Is the contract worth winning?
AI can be very useful in working through those questions. The decision is still yours.
If you want a wider view of how the stages fit together, this guide explains the UK tendering process from early market engagement through to award. Read the tendering process guide
Then think about the answer
One of the problems with AI is that it makes it incredibly easy to produce 1,000 words. That is not necessarily progress.
Before generating a response, work out what the evaluator needs to understand about your offer by the time they have finished reading it. What evidence proves it? Which examples are most relevant? What might worry the evaluator? Is there something genuinely different or better about your approach? Have you actually answered every part of the question?
Now AI has something useful to work with. There is quite a difference between asking "Write a 1,000-word response to this question" and giving it the question, scoring criteria, your evidence and a thought-through approach to the answer.
The first can produce something that sounds like a bid. The second has a much better chance of helping you develop a good one.
For more on why generic AI bid answers can lose marks, read our guide to what evaluators are actually looking for. Read why AI bid tools lose marks
The human still matters
None of this means handing the bid over to a machine. Quite the opposite.
AI does not run your organisation. It does not know that the clever solution it has suggested will drive your operations director mad. It does not necessarily know that the slightly less impressive-looking case study is actually much more relevant to this buyer.
It does not sit in meetings with your customers, understand the personalities in your delivery team or carry years of experience of what actually works. And it is not going to have to deliver the promises made in the tender.
That is why BidMate deliberately keeps the human involved. It can do a lot of the legwork: reading, organising, comparing, finding, questioning and challenging. The person using it still has to exercise judgement.
They decide which evidence matters. They decide whether an idea is realistic. They bring the creativity. They make the commercial calls. And ultimately, they decide what gets submitted. That is not something BidMate is hoping to automate away eventually. It is how the product is intended to work.
There is another job AI can be surprisingly good at
Once you have written the response, try asking a separate AI session to tear it apart. Give it the original question, the scoring criteria and your answer. Do not ask whether the response is good.
Ask it to find the reasons an evaluator might not give it full marks. Where is the evidence weak? What has not actually been answered? Which claims are assertions rather than demonstrated facts? Where have outputs been confused with outcomes? Which commitments are vague? What might a stronger competitor say?
You will probably disagree with some of what comes back. Good. The point is not to blindly follow the AI's recommendations. It is to have something challenge your thinking before the evaluator does.
This is the thinking behind BidMate's adversarial Bid Review.
Upload your tender documents and draft response, and BidMate will review the bid against the buyer's questions and scoring criteria before you submit. Check your bid with BidMate
And that is roughly where BidMate comes in
If you followed everything above, you would have the beginnings of a pretty capable AI bidding system. You would need to organise your evidence so the AI can use it, set up each opportunity with the right documents, research the buyer and competitors, qualify the opportunity, develop a win strategy, build responses around evidence and keep checking back against the original requirements.
Then you would need to run a separate challenge process before submission. You would need prompts and processes for each of those stages and some way of keeping everything organised from one bid to the next. You absolutely can do it.
BidMate has simply done much of that work already. The Evidence Locker gives you somewhere to build up the information that proves what your organisation can do. Opportunities retain their tender context. Qualification, buyer research and competitor analysis happen before response writing. Win strategy shapes the response rather than being retrofitted afterwards. Review goes back to what the buyer actually asked and how they have said they will score it.
The AI underneath helps make all of that possible. Currently that is Gemini. In future it could be something else. The bidding process is the product, not the model.
Isn't that just an AI wrapper?
Pretty much. But "wrapper" has become a slightly odd criticism of AI software.
There is an old story about an engineer being called to fix a machine that nobody else can get working. He looks at it for a while, takes out a hammer and taps one particular spot. The machine starts working.
The customer is not impressed when the bill arrives. Why should it cost so much for one tap with a hammer? The point of the story is that the tap costs almost nothing. Knowing where to hit the machine is what you are paying for.
It is almost certainly an apocryphal story, but it makes the point rather well. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and the rest are extraordinarily capable tools. BidMate does not need to pretend otherwise.
You can absolutely use them to help you bid. The harder bit is knowing what information to give them, what questions to ask, what order to do things in, when to believe the answer, when to challenge it and when to ignore it completely.
And underneath all of that, you still need to know what a good bid looks like. That is the bit BidMate is trying to provide. Not an AI that bids instead of you. A better way for you to bid.
FAQ
Can ChatGPT write a tender response?
ChatGPT and other AI tools can help draft, structure and review tender responses, but they need the tender documents, scoring criteria and real evidence from your organisation. A generic prompt is unlikely to produce a strong bid on its own.
What should I give an AI tool before asking it to write a bid?
Start with the tender documents, the questions, the scoring criteria, word limits, buyer requirements and your own evidence such as case studies, policies, accreditations, delivery processes and performance data.
Why use BidMate instead of a general AI tool?
BidMate is built around the bidding process: organising evidence, setting up each opportunity, researching the buyer, qualifying the bid, shaping the win strategy, drafting responses and reviewing them against the buyer's criteria.
Can AI review a bid before submission?
Yes, if it is given the tender question, scoring criteria and draft response. The most useful review looks for reasons an evaluator might withhold marks, including missing evidence, vague commitments and unanswered parts of the question.