Every tender software vendor now puts “AI” on its homepage. For a bid manager deciding where the team spends its time, that word says little. The real question is what the software actually does with a new publication, with an eighty-page specification and with the question of who else is going to bid.
This page answers that question for TenderWolf. What the AI does, what it works on, what it costs and what it does not do (yet).
Where AI saves time in the tender process
A bid team does not lose its time writing proposals. It loses it in the steps before: going through publications every day, opening specifications only to find after three pages that the contract does not fit, and guessing who the competition is. TenderWolf applies AI to exactly those three steps.
1. Matching: the right tenders out of thousands of publications
TenderWolf reads the new public tenders in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France every day, plus all European publications above the thresholds via TED. Matching with your company profile works in two layers.
The first layer is rule-based: your search profiles determine, by CPV codes, NUTS regions, keywords, accreditations (construction), form types and contracting authorities, which publications qualify. That is the net.
The second layer is AI text analysis. Your TenderDNA contains reference tenders: contracts that are exactly what you are looking for. New publications are compared in substance with those references, so a contract that fits in content but was published under an unexpected CPV code still rises to the top.
For every match you see why the tender was selected. That is deliberate: you cannot correct a black box. If you reject a match, the system knows it should show less of that kind. If you add a tender to your TenderDNA, it knows it should look for more of it.
2. Summarizing specifications: the Quickscan
A match is only interesting if the specification holds up. The Quickscan reads the administrative specification and summarizes it in ten points: subject of the contract, keywords, procedure type, estimated value, selection criteria, technical standards, required references, award criteria, tender potential and whether a site visit is mandatory.
The difference with a summary of the notice alone is large. The notice says a school is being renovated. The specification says you need three comparable references from the last five years, a class 5 accreditation, and that price carries 40 percent of the weight. Those are the points you decide on.
You can also search the contract documents directly for keywords, for instance a technical standard or a certificate that is a hard requirement for you.
3. Qualifying and screening: the Workflow
Tenders you are considering go into the Workflow. There the AI helps you answer the three questions that drive every GO/NO GO decision: are we eligible (do we meet the selection requirements), can we deliver (do we have the capacity and the references) and do we want to (is the contract commercially attractive).
Per dossier, the screening shows which companies previously carried out similar contracts for this contracting authority, and which companies in the region have relevant experience. That analysis draws on the award data and opening reports that TenderWolf collects. Before you bid, you know whether you are up against an incumbent that has already won three times, or whether the field is open.
Read more about that step on the page about assessing tenders from quickscan to GO/NO GO.
What the AI in TenderWolf does not do
Being honest about this saves you a disappointment after the first week.
It does not write your bid. AI support for writing bids is under development, but not available yet. The argumentation, the pricing and the creative solution remain human work.
It does not take the GO/NO GO decision. The qualification structures the questions and supplies the facts. The decision is yours and your team’s.
It does not replace reading the specification for dossiers you submit. The Quickscan is triage. For the three dossiers a month you actually bid on, you read the specification in full. The AI makes sure you do not lose that time on the other twenty.
It does not always have the French specification. For Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg the contract documents are as a rule available. For France they are often only found on the local platforms. You then retrieve and upload them yourself; the Quickscan works as usual afterwards.
How to assess AI tender software
Anyone comparing several platforms can test the AI claims against five questions.
- Does the AI work on the specification or only on the notice? Only the specification contains the selection and award criteria you decide on.
- Does the system show why something was matched? Without that explanation you cannot correct the matching and you keep getting noise.
- Does it learn from your feedback? Rejecting and confirming must change the next result.
- What does an analysis cost? Ask for the price per specification analysis or screening. At TenderWolf that is transparent through credits (see below).
- Can you test it without a sales call? You can only judge an AI summary by running it on one of your own specifications.
A broader comparison of platforms, including coverage and price, is on the page comparing tender software.
What the AI features cost
All AI features are included in every plan, including the free plan, and are paid for in credits. A Quickscan costs 25 credits, a screening 50. You start with 3,000 credits; on the Free plan your balance is topped up monthly to 750 credits. Standard (€79 per month) gives 5,000 credits per month, Professional (€149 per month) 15,000 credits and coverage of all European countries.
With the starting credits you can therefore immediately analyze a series of specifications and screen a few dossiers, without a credit card and without a time limit. All details are on the pricing page.
Getting started
Create a free account, set up your first search profile and run the Quickscan on a specification your team recently read themselves. Compare the summary with what you took from it. That is the most honest test there is.
Start free → · Request a demo → · Read how AI is changing tender analysis →