GovSpend + Iris: Use AI to Transform Your Bid Response Workflow

Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We have a very exciting presentation, discussing GovSpend and one of our newer partnerships with AI. So excited to dive into it today. We have a couple of presenters, Natasha from the GovSpend side, and Ben from the Iris side, the CEO and founder. So a lot of exciting things to discuss today. So without further ado, I will kick it over to Natasha to drive the bus. Alright. Perfect. Just a recap of our agenda for today. We're gonna go through GovSpend's bids and RFP data, coverage stats and search experience, some RFP trends that we're seeing, GovSpend's latest AI features, and then a quick overview of AI as well as we know that's one of the biggest things, for the focus today. We're gonna spend the majority of our time there. I am Natasha Martinez. I'm a renewal manager with GovSpend. I've been with the company for a little over two years now. I've had the pleasure of working with a wide variety of our customers across different industries, which has really allowed me to understand some of the unique challenges different industries face when responding to bids. So who do we serve? Of course, those government vendors and contractors, but we also serve a number of federal and slate SLED agencies as well who rely on our data for some of their core functions. And then we have many strategy and consulting customers as well. The GovSpin platform. So we are known for providing that three sixty view into all things government spending and procurement. We're gonna focus on bids and RFPs today. But, I'm gonna touch on some of the supporting aspects of the other modules and datasets as well. A brief overview of our current coverage stats. We have one point seven billion PO line items, eighty nine thousand open bids, seven hundred and three active contracts, eight point two million contacts, and one point six million meetings. Gov GovSpend is the leader in overall data coverage, which is one of the reasons that AI selected us as a partner. Next, I'm gonna focus on our growth within the bids module specifically. This is just highlighting our growth over the last couple of years. Bids will always be a top priority for us as we wanna remain highly competitive in the space, and we know that bids are the lifeline for many companies. Next, I wanna just review a few stats that I've pulled, some trends that we're seeing within the space. First and foremost, agencies like the state of Wisconsin and Ohio have moved away from lowest bidder wins toward a score based solution oriented RFP process. Wisconsin's committee awards contracts based on overall score rather than simple price, and Ohio reports fifty to seventy four percent of its procurements use this solution based method as well. So there's a shift that reflects growing interest in quality innovation and life cycle value, not just costs. As we can all imagine, changing vendors is expensive, and it can be very time consuming. And then as it pertains to the bid and RFP process, it takes an average team thirty two hours, nine individuals, ten days just to complete the first draft. And then fifty percent of businesses are reporting too few resources as a challenge to completing the RFX processes on time. So limited resources, which is driving the need to do more with less, we are having these conversations on a regular basis with our customers. There's no shortage of customers that are expressing this concern. A conversation that I recently had with a proposal manager within the construction industry, comes to mind. They had identified one hundred and thirty six opportunities that they could respond to within a year, but they were only able to respond to sixty eight. So this is a growing concern for our customer base and precisely why we AI as a partner to help with this challenge. So up next, I will go ahead and kick it off to Ben to go through an overview of the Iris solution. Awesome. Thank you so much for the introduction, Natasha, and GovSpend team. It's great to be here. I'm Ben Hills, founder and CEO of iris. And just years ago, I was sitting in your all seat. I was leading an EdTech company selling campus visit software to colleges and universities. And at all my safe searches set up every time a contract was expiring and a new bid was available, and it was awesome. All of a sudden, we went from having a few opportunities to respond to every year to hundreds of opportunities, but there was one challenge. I didn't magically have more subject matter experts like me who were available to actually respond to those bids and craft those RFP proposals and all of the content needed to win the deal. And thus, we set out to build AI. Now it wasn't just me that had that challenge. Across the industry, over two thirds of all enterprise deals today are requiring RFPs. And it's not just RFPs anymore. You know? It's also security reviews and due diligence questionnaires, statements of work, and sole source statements. The complexity has increased quite significantly. And it as a result, it takes a team thirty two hours across nine subject matter experts just to get to first draft. And there's such a burden on teams to get there that one in five RFPs the team start, they never even end up submitting because they either missed some requirement or just ran out of time. We built AI to enable every team to put their best foot forward with every prospect and every customer. And what AI does is centralizes your most up to date institutional knowledge and uses that to draft the highest quality possible RFP responses. That means that we're going to contextualize your latest product documentation, marketing collateral, security policies, and client stories, and use that to shape the highest quality possible responses to every bid in every RFP. Don't just take it from me. Take it from one of our partners at Corelight. Corelight developed threat detection hardware for navy submarines and other high risk and regulated assets. And with AI, he was able to reduce the time spent on drafting responses to RFPs from sixty hours to just two hours. That meant that every sales engineer and sales rep was able to increase the number of active sales cycles they were working with, thus allowing them to generate more revenue and win the business. Now many people ask us, it's great that you saved us a lot of time, but what do we do with that extra time? And that's why we're super excited to be exclusive partners with Govt. Ben. Because now as one joint solution, we're able to bring the industry not just the ability to respond to RFPs faster, but also source and find net new opportunities. And now a company can find an opportunity in GovSpend and respond to it in AI. It reduces the overall workflow of that process from over ten hours down to just a couple hours. Now in a few minutes, I'll walk you through live in iris how we're able to easily start a project, complex RFPs and security reviews, generate responses based on our most up to date business context, collaborate with our team on all the edits and design of our RFP, and then ultimately use that response to help implement the client after we found out we've won the RFP. First, I'll pass it back to Natasha to show some of the new exciting updates in GovSpend and how GovSpend clients can help find more bids that they're qualified for. Natasha, take it away. Awesome. Thanks so much, Ben. And I'm excited to get us started with the initial process of identifying a solid fit bid opportunity within the GovSpend platform. So AI going to use cybersecurity services as an example, just to highlight, a few new features that we've added to make this identification process a little bit quicker, a little more efficient. Gonna select one of these top opportunities here. Now we've got a details page, and we've got three files here. The one thing that I want you to look for is in the right hand corner, this little purple icon. This is where GovSpend dot ai has been layered into our modules. You're not only gonna see this within the bids module, but this is in our contracts and our meeting intelligence module right now. So when you're in those modules looking at a record, be on the lookout for this little purple icon. We've got three files here that we could spend fifteen to twenty minutes going through to see if this is a fit. But rather than do that, we're gonna open up this AI, and you're gonna see these canned questions. So some of the most frequently asked questions to help identify whether this is a good fit, what do we need to do, who do we need to contact, you can select any of these or you can type in the bottom search box, really, any question that's gonna help you to quickly qualify or disqualify this opportunity. I'm gonna go ahead and just select one of the pre canned questions we have, generate a sales brief. And you can see this is generating a sales brief based on all of the information within those files. So quickly getting to the information you need to AI, is this something we're gonna go after or not? Once we've decided, yes, this is a great fit for us, we understand the key points, the AI, This is something we wanna go after. This is where we're gonna download the AI, and we're gonna go into iris. So I will give it back to Ben to go ahead and walk through the iris platform. Walk you all through iris and how teams use iris to respond to RFPs. Iris is a simple web platform designed to start by centralizing all of your institutional knowledge and then use that to draft all of the responses to any RFP. The first thing we need to do is teach AI about our business. Now Iris is a private enclosed AI ecosystem. So until you hand it and feed it some information, it won't be able to generate any content. You can bring this content in from integrations from your file storage systems, GRC platforms, and sales enablement tools. You can also drag and drop content in directly. This could be past proposals. It could be product documentation. You could even point it to your website to pull up blog posts, and AI will instantly parse through and contextualize all of that unstructured data to start learning about your company, how you talk about your products, and how you position yourself in the market. Once you've taught Iris about your business, we can head over to our project section and actually drag and drop in an RFP. Now your sales team can upload this to a CRM record. They can drop it into Slack or Teams, or they can upload it directly into our web platform. You'll get a quick preview of the RFP that you're responding to, and then you can set up your workflow to ensure that the proper reviewers on your team get notified when Aris has generated its responses. And you can choose which segment of your knowledge map you actually want Iris to pull from when generating responses. Maybe you serve different countries or have different product lines, and you wanna make sure to only pull from certain subsets of information, and you can do all of that right in the setup here. Next, you can guide iris in two really unique ways. The first is context that helps iris prioritize what information you wanna highlight about your business. For instance, when I was selling campus visit software, if I was responding to an RFP for the University of Arizona versus Savannah College of Art and Design, same product, same differently. I wanna highlight different client stories, talk about different features. And so I can use project context to say something like AI examples of other large state universities we have worked with. And this will actually guide Iris when it surfaces context from its knowledge map to prioritize information that matches this criteria. The next is how we're able to shape responses. If I'm responding to a federal RFP versus security questionnaire or writing a proposal, I I might talk in three totally different writing styles. Just like your marketing team has a visual brand guideline like text codes and logos, AI software has instructions in how they also write style based on your brand guidelines. Now we'll provide you with some out of the box templates and also work with your team to fine tune these instructions until the content matches your style and tone and sounds like it was written by your team. When I click next, AI starts going to work. Iris will start going through each section and question of the RFP, surfacing all of the most relevant information about your business and using that to draft the highest quality possible responses. Now when I drill into an RFP, I have all of my ability to collaborate with my team. So I can assign my legal questions to my general counsel and my technical questions to my engineering team. They can come directly inside of the platform and make any edits, whether that's adding an images, changing text, formatting. All of that happens right inside of the system. I can get some insight into how Iris generated the response, reasoning score as to where the context was pulled from and how that led to the actual response. And I can even drill in and see the specific sections of my knowledge map that were used to generate this answer. Now because all of this workflow is happening directly inside of iris, two really unique things are gained. One, iris becomes smarter the more you use it. Every project completed in Iris feeds the system. And the result is that by the time clients are on their third RFP, Iris is generating ninety five percent accurate ready to use content on its first draft. The other thing that means is that AI handles all the project management. Rather than going to Slack threads and email chains and comments in Google Docs to figure out who owes what and dreading sending them a nudge saying, hey. I I really need this AI today. AI handles all of the communications with stakeholders in the project automatically for you, notifying them of upcoming deadlines, due dates, and the work that's assigned to them. When I'm done, I can export my project back in the original requested document or on my own custom branded letterhead template so that it matches my look and feel, and I can present to that prospect a high quality proposal. Now once you've finished a project, AI will create a handoff plan that you can find in your reporting portal where we have built an algorithm that extracts all commitments you've made to that client. Every promise, whether it's Saturday support or shipping a certain feature or delivery AI gets collected by iris automatically so you can help your handoff process and your account management team understand the expectations of that client. You You can always track the progress of every project happening in AI from one centralized reporting place or back in your CRM. Now the other thing that happens when you complete a project is that iris will use that data in to feed the system and make that AI across your team. One of the things that I knew from overseeing the RFP process was that a lot of the best knowledge was created at the finish line of a deal cycle. So I'd constantly be finishing an RFP and then bringing that back to my sales team and saying, hey. Open this up to learn the latest positioning or how to talk about some new functionality we have. Now your team can access that by prompting Iris directly. So anyone can come in here and ask a question AI, where is data stored, or how does our AI functionality work? And Iris will, just like with an RFP, surface all of that context in real time and use that to generate a response, citing its sources, and showing you exactly where that information came from. Now really excited to announce today that our team along with GovSpend started the work on integrating our platforms directly. So coming soon in the future will be the ability when you're on a bid page in GovSpend to, in one click, push that over to AI and have Iris automatically start responding to that bid and opportunity. For those of you who don't know, we have a quick start package available. Clients who sign up before June will get one additional license free. It's a five thousand dollar quick start package that comes with your first three licenses to IRIS. I believe there's a link somewhere in the Zoom, and we'll also post a link right up here so that anyone can sign up, request a demo, and learn more about how they can bring the power of iris and GovSpend to their team. Now I'll pass it over to Luke to start leading us in a q and a session. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Awesome. You know, again, as I said to to start, it's a fantastic partnership. I think the use of AI is really gonna streamline, you know, the proposal submission process and then the tech that you're bringing to the market is fantastic. There's a couple questions actually in our chat here. Ben, you should be able to see them. A lot of them are based on how we're training the model to produce these these outcomes, these these, solicitation responses. So could you just talk a little bit about how we're aggregating that information, what the input looks like to get the output? Absolutely. So every client who uses Iris has access to their own isolated AI enclosed ecosystem that only becomes an expert in the information you feed it. Now I know a lot of people see headlines about AI training of models taking months based on lots of data with a cutoff date. AI is totally different. Some clients come to us with just one document, like their most recent proposal. Others come to us with tens of thousands of documents, and you can always bring new documentation in, take it out, and edit it. And so most clients are able to get to their first drafted responses in a single onboarding session with us where we will provision you access to your instance, set up integrations that are all done in one click. As soon as you bring files in, Iris parses through them, and then we're we'll work with you on drafting our first set of responses. At any point, you can then alter that knowledge map, remove files, add a new information, refresh information. And, of course, because you're doing the work in AI, iris is also learning from all of the information you're creating in the system to continuously update the platform. Awesome. Love that. I have another one here too that's kinda relevant to that. Does AI hallucinate? I know that's one of the the kinda hot button topics out there using AI. Does it hallucinate? And if so, what is the, kind of protection that Iris is using to minimize or prevent that? It's a great question. Iris does not hallucinate as a function of the the architecture of our system. And if you think about building AI systems on a scale of imaginative to accurate or deterministic, ChatPBT is hyper imaginative. It's designed to always have something to say, and it's AI if you use it to respond to an RFP, it might make up case studies and create features that don't actually exist in your product. AI is designed as a deterministic reasoning engine, which is a fancy way of saying it only can use the information in context you've provided it in order to actually generate responses. So if there's a question that AI doesn't have an answer to based on your business's information, then Iris will just simply say, there's not enough information to answer this question. The great part is if your team then puts the answer to that question inside of Iris, Iris will learn from that and know how to answer that question in your next project. We also provide customers with accuracy scores, so you'll have access on every project and in aggregate to see exactly what percent of the questions Iris was able to answer, how many answers your team edited before just approving them with no edits, and using that to help you really Awesome. I got AI one here, and I think this is we kinda touched on a little bit, but what type of encryption is AI running? This is from, Miguel AI, one of the participants here. What type of encryption is IRIS running, and what would be the process of dealing with confidential information? Great question. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and we we've achieved our SOC two type two compliance by a third party independent certified auditor. It's done on a continuous monitoring basis. So they're three hundred sixty five days a year ensuring that we have all of the proper provisions in place to make sure that we're adhering to the types of confidentiality and security that we set out for our clients. Today, we have some of the largest law firms, consulting firms, publicly traded software companies using our platform who've all undergone the security review of our system. And, Miguel, always happy to share any of our pen tests and software reports if we're under an NDA as well. Very cool. Yeah. I know. Especially if coming from the vendor side of things, nobody wants their information out there. So keep it a lock and key on. That's pretty important. Absolutely. We do have one question here from, I don't know who put it in there originally. Essentially, it's it's asking about the AI generated responses going to that public agency. There's been some consternation in the past, especially on the federal level, with some of these contracting officers receiving AI generated responses. Do you have any kinda context or or response to that, Ben, where you're either seeing or hearing or what your system does to alleviate some of those concerns? Absolutely. So AI would say we two things that we hear in the way we look at it. One is much of the government is now turning to adopting AI tools for the review and procurement processes because they're seeing the efficiency gains and how much more granular and detailed an AI system can be in evaluating RFPs. I know two years ago, there was a lot more fear, uncertainty, and doubt in how the federal government would adopt AI for procurement processes. But there have been some executive orders as recently as a few weeks ago that have actually specifically asked every agency to adopt AI in their procurement processes. Now we've all seen the AI slop, as people call it, on LinkedIn. And one of the things we're really proud about is how customers choose AI over other AI tools specifically because of the quality of responses our platform generates. And so our responses are trained on your tone and voice, the way that you respond to RFPs, and then even further tweaked and fine tuned so that the content it's generating is world class and sounds like it was written by your team, not written by a robot. Awesome. And then in AI of the same vein, are you able to add I don't wanna say a pricing list, but are you able to pull pricing into this model for for submission? We can. If you have rate cards and pricing sheets, it's something even our own team uses AI for when we need to really quickly create a proposal. If you have that information, you can bring it into IRIS. It's a great use of the tagging structure in our knowledge base. We might have a tag just for your rate cards and prices, a tag with your marketing collateral, and use all of that so that you can generate content in real time and on the fly. Awesome. We got a ton of questions here, guys. I love love the love the collaboration here. Let's see here. Kurt Johnson, are you able to mark q and a pairs as a best answer so that Iris prioritizes that response versus, maybe something that's not as recent? So by default, AI will use any answers that you've approved and take them verbatim without rewriting or restylizing them. And so for those questions AI, what's our mailing address, or have we ever been under active litigation, some of those that have very standard boilerplate answers that shouldn't be rewritten or fluffed up, AI will always use what your team has marked as an approved answer as the source of truth and as that content. Let's see here. Tina Albus, does AI allow a company to upload past content from RFP, RFOs, etcetera to build our company data, or does that information get uploaded? How does that information get uploaded? Excuse me. We we absolutely use that. One of the most common onboarding flows for companies is to bring in past RFPs, RFOs, and proposals, and then also supplement that with recent blog posts, case studies, product documentation. So AI can can contextualize all of those sources of information. You could drop in one past RFP that you've written and then a blank RFP that you wanna respond to, and AI could rely on even just that one past RFP to generate high quality responses. It gets uploaded either by importing it from one of our integrations, AI, maybe that lives in your Google Drive or SharePoint, or you can just drag and drop in that PDF or Word doc directly into the system as well. Awesome. We have another one here from Natalie Dostat. When will the integration for GovSpend be rolled out? So I'll take a little bit of this one. As of right now, it's been mentioned earlier, we are we are working together with our tech teams to really ensure that that functionality is gonna be, made you know, brought to market as soon as possible. Right now, it is not currently in production, but we're in that AI of discovery phase. So more to come on that. I don't wanna give you a a product release AI if we don't really have one set. But, certainly, within the next, you know, hopefully, by the end of the year at the latest, it's something that we hope to roll out. In the short term, we do have a full support team on the GovSpin side to be able to facilitate some of these pulls for you and really start to to make that seamless for you as we're working to get that integration in place. Ben, anything to add to that one? No. The only thing I I I would say is, you know, we, both companies make prioritizations based on what we hear from our customers. We were so excited by the feedback we've gotten from our first set of partners that both teams have been meeting every day for the past week or so, specifically, just design and scope out that integration. So it is, it is coming soon. We will make sure that all customers are kept up to date as that progresses through our road map, and we're really excited for you all to see it. Awesome. And I think we have our our last question here from Tina. Is there a limit on the data that we can upload? No limit. All of our pricing includes unlimited data to upload into your knowledge base and unlimited RFPs, questionnaires, etcetera that you're gonna respond to. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, again, Ben, Natasha, thank you so much today for for leading our conversation. There's a ton of, engagement here from the the, the folks that joined, so thank you very much for that. There was a a quick chat in there that shows you some you know, kind of AI you to how to get to the next steps if you wanna see a demo, if you wanted to have more conversation with either the GovSpend or AI team. So check that out. It's in the, the webinar chat here. We will be sending out the recording, so anyone that's registered today will be receiving a recording once it's downloaded. So that's gonna be coming to your inbox shortly. But as always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the GovSpend team, reach out to the AI team. We're happy to help out. And, really excited about this partnership and what it can do for for your public sector market. Awesome. Thanks so much, everyone. Thanks, everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day. Have a great week.