Ditch your RFPs: Sales teams defeat RFPs with GenAI

Crusty, old RFPs are dead, and sales teams are celebrating the technology that has defeated procurement’s dreaded go-to tool. With generative AI (GenAI), sales teams can load an RFP into a custom-built OpenAI GPT filled with go-to-market collateral and special response instructions. What once took days or weeks of manual work can be done in hours, creating challenges for procurement teams trying to differentiate between real expertise from companies it’s considering hiring and AI-enhanced submissions.

Traditional RFP processes now face questions about their effectiveness. While competitive bidding is not yet obsolete, it must evolve to support alternative procurement approaches, integrate AI-driven validation mechanisms, and refocus on supplier solutions that are best for clients’ requirements rather than static proposal evaluations.

RFPs were broken, and AI just made it worse

For decades, procurement teams have relied on RFPs and eSourcing tools to run structured, repeatable vendor selection processes. RFPs have driven efficiency, compliance, and cost savings. However, long, tedious lists of detailed questions and vast attachment requests create nightmares for providers and internal stakeholders alike. The principal issues are:

• RFPs are too rigid and vague, offering little room for vendors to tailor solutions and rarely providing meaningful insight into client goals or requirements.
• Procurement’s use of eSourcing tools has streamlined internal workflows but further restricted response formats into rigid online forms, reducing the quality of supplier input.
• Vendors often guess their way through RFPs, incurring response costs of up to $1M—costs that ultimately get baked into the buyer’s pricing.
• AI-driven sales teams are now gaming the system, feeding past proposals and canned content into data lakes to generate instant, polished responses with GenAI.
• Procurement teams struggle to distinguish real expertise from AI-crafted content, as RFP responses have always leaned toward generic, lifeless language.
• The result: Vendors with the best AI tools—not the best solutions—are increasingly winning, putting procurement outcomes and vendor fit at risk.

RFPs aren’t dead yet, but enterprises must be smarter about how to get the best results from a competitive bid process. The RFP was never the best tool—it was simply a way to collect responses efficiently. It has always been too tedious and lacked collaboration with bidders, rarely allowed for bidders to provide custom solutions that would fit requirements better, and was far too focused on written proposals rather than oral presentations—which is what we all know matters most.

How procurement can make competitive bidding work in the AI era

Rather than abandoning competitive bidding and eSourcing, procurement teams should leverage them differently, focusing less on written proposals and more on dynamic supplier assessments.

Exhibit 1: Improved sourcing methodologies

Source: HFS Research, 2025

The future of eSourcing: from process automation to decision intelligence

Don’t trash your eSourcing tools yet. In an environment where GenAI is flooding RFP processes with polished, machine-generated content, procurement must rethink how to use these platforms. The future of eSourcing lies in augmenting traditional sourcing methodologies with dynamic, performance-driven methods.

Procurement leaders should stop relying on proposal scoring and embrace real-time, real-world supplier evaluation that GenAI can’t beat. That means using eSourcing methods to support:

• Reverse auctions, where prequalified vendors bid live on scope and price.
• Dynamic vendor pools that reduce the need for repetitive RFP cycles.
• Challenge-based procurement, where suppliers solve real business problems in real-world, live settings instead of submitting static documents.
• Collaborative vendor innovation, enabling deeper, co-created solutions.

This shift requires eSourcing tools to evolve from document repositories to decision intelligence engines—platforms that combine AI-assisted validation, supplier performance analytics, and live collaboration features.

The Bottom Line: Procurement must evolve—not retreat

RFPs and eSourcing tools aren’t dead—but using them the same way in an AI-powered world is a fast track to irrelevance. GenAI has exposed just how brittle and performative the traditional procurement process really is. Procurement teams must stop treating proposal documents as proxies for vendor capability and start investing in smarter, outcome-driven strategies.

The future belongs to procurement leaders who reimagine competitive bidding as a performance-based, AI-assisted decision process—one that values real engagement, real delivery, and real results over the illusion of thoroughness. Don’t ditch your tools—upgrade your methodology.