When Every Bid Matters, Speed Becomes the Moat
For enterprises that compete globally, the Request for Proposal (RFP) process is both an opportunity and a bottleneck. Each submission is a potential growth engine, but for a global technology leader operating in more than 190 countries, RFPs had long been painfully inefficient.
Drafting a response meant wading through sprawling, unstructured documents, coordinating sales, legal and engineering teams, and ensuring every sentence aligned with licensing and compliance standards. Instead of accelerating growth, the process slowed it down.
The cracks were clear:
- Teams spent days manually extracting and drafting content
- Responses varied in tone and quality without a shared knowledge base
- Delays pushed deadlines and jeopardized submissions
- Repetition persisted even across RFPs with familiar themes
In a market where win rates hinge on speed and precision, the client realized efficiency had to become the differentiator. The Agent for RFP, built on Copilot Studio, was already in place, but moving it from prototype to enterprise reality required a trusted partner.
That’s where Persistent stepped in: not to reinvent the agent, but to stabilize, sustain and prepare it for enterprise-scale use—ensuring reliability, compliance and long-term impact.
Winning RFPs isn’t about volume of words—it’s about speed, precision and consistency.
From Assistance to Autonomy
Most organizations are experimenting with copilots, but copilots still wait for prompts. They respond only when asked. The Agent for RFP was different: it could act on its own, the moment an email arrived.
Unlike assistants that need instructions, this agent works like a self-directed AI colleague. Persistent’s role was to ensure it could run reliably in an enterprise environment—resolving bugs, monitoring outputs and validating compliance so every proposal could be trusted.
What the Agent can Do:
- Auto-ingest RFP emails and attachments
- Apply deep reasoning over a curated knowledge base to interpret requirements and align with compliance
- Perform end-to-end drafting, from executive summary to compliance checklist, project plan and confidence scores
- Handle integrated delivery, posting drafts to Teams, versioning them in SharePoint and making them instantly reviewable by stakeholders
Under the hood, Copilot Studio orchestrates behavior, while Power Platform and SharePoint manage workflow and knowledge. Teams becomes the collaborative hub where the first version of a proposal is already waiting.
This isn’t just automation—it’s autonomy. The AI takes the first step every time.
How it Works: A Closed-loop Factory for Proposals
The workflow is simple but transformative. An RFP email arrives. The agent parses its contents, extracts scope, timelines and compliance requirements, and reasons over the internal knowledge base. A complete draft is then generated—including executive summary, solution narrative, compliance checklist and project plan—before being delivered directly into Teams and archived in SharePoint.
No separate workflows. No lost time. No risk of someone missing the thread. This closed-loop cycle turned fragmented effort into coordinated automation. And the timing couldn’t be more urgent.
Business Impact: Turning Speed into Strategy
The true value of the Agent for RFP was visible not just in what it did, but in what changed as a result.
- Operational efficiency came first: Drafting time fell by almost 90%. What once took days was compressed into minutes. A fully automated intake-to-delivery cycle meant faster turnarounds—and faster turnarounds meant more bids submitted on time, raising win rates.
- Consistency and compliance improved: With a centralized knowledge base underpinning every draft, responses stopped varying from team to team. Risk of omissions dropped and compliance language became uniform.
- Collaboration shifted: Drafts appeared in Teams for same-day editing. Cross-functional stakeholders—from legal to sales—could co-author in real time. Teams stopped retyping boilerplate and started focusing on strategic refinement.
- Scalability was built in: Because the solution was modular, it could easily be extended to new domains: legal drafting, procurement onboarding, claims processing, even sales enablement. And because it ran on tools employees already used, adoption was frictionless.
- Governance and transparency followed. Every draft came with version-controlled logs, updated documentation and audit-ready records—critical in regulated industries.
As McKinsey highlights, AI can lift knowledge worker productivity by 20–30%, especially in drafting-heavy workflows. For this client, those gains were visible in every RFP submitted.
From days of effort to drafts in minutes, the Agent for RFP turned efficiency into competitive edge.
Extending the Impact: From RFPs to the Enterprise
Though the first use case was RFPs, the design was never narrow. With its modular architecture, the agent could extend into:
- Legal contracts and NDAs
- Procurement onboarding
- Claims responses
- Sales enablement briefs
The roadmap also includes multi-agent workflows for collaborative review, human-in-the-loop feedback loops for continuous learning and dashboards to track proposal trends and win-loss ratios. In other words, the agent was never just about solving today’s RFP pain—it was engineered to enable tomorrow’s enterprise-wide automation.
Closing Snapshot
This initiative is among the first to combine Copilot Studio with deep reasoning to autonomously generate business documents—without waiting for a human prompt. Recognized as a flagship AI use case, it shows how Persistent helps enterprises move from manual effort to AI-led execution at scale.
What began with RFPs now stands as a blueprint for intelligent automation across the enterprise.
Turn proposals into a competitive advantage. Scale automation beyond RFPs. From pilots to enterprise-wide adoption.
