Your RFPs, That Go To the Wrong Vendors, Suck Because CONTEXT MATTERS!

We briefly covered this in our post on how There are No Simple Answers Because CONTEXT MATTERS, but we feel we have to call it out and cover it again in its own post because, over the past few weeks, the doctor has

  • been asked multiple times for a list of the best vendors for X that just need to do A, B, C
  • been told that Gen-AI can help a client write better RFPs (and that he would like to see the new Gen-AI capabilities in the sourcing/procurement/services/contract management application, which, FYI, he wouldn’t)

when the reality is that:

  • there is no way he can give a short list of relevance without understanding at least the
    • company size, geography, and industry
    • existing S2P/ERP ecosystem and maturity
    • primary pain points

    because

    • company size can dictate minimum vendor size; geography presence, language, or cultural skills; and industry key capabilities that a platform will need
    • unless it’s a rip and replace project, the new module/solution will have to play in the existing ecosystem
    • and nothing defines what is needed more than the pain (not a random list of features that the buyer doesn’t really understand and just assumes will solve their problem)
  • as we have repeatedly explained, there is no Artificial Intelligence, Gen-AI is as dumb as a doorknob, and it doesn’t write better RFPs (although it may write better English) — not even close

Now, we really want to dive into this second point.

You can NOT write a good RFP if you don’t know:

  • what your pain points are
  • why you have them (i.e. process, system, and/or data issues)
  • where gaps need to be filled in your current system landscape (and what that landscape is)
  • how advanced your employees are in their TQ (Technical Quotient) and Procurement maturity
  • who will be using it and for what
  • when it is used in workflow-based processes

And, guess what, Gen-AI doesn’t know that, and doesn’t even know how to elicit that. For an RFP builder to be useful, it has to help you gather this. Which means experts need to encode it with methodologies and questions to elicit all this. Only then can Gen-AI LLMs be used to actually construct an RFP in natural language. So if all the vendor has is a nice shiny LLM wrapper, they have nothing useful. Remember that.