For decades, the tendering game ran on settled rules. Incumbents held the advantage. Big suppliers had dedicated bid teams. Everyone else made up the numbers. In the past two years, generative AI has quietly scrambled those rules, not just for the businesses writing tenders, but for the buyers issuing them. If you sell to government or large organisations, or you've been thinking about it, the numbers below describe the market you're actually walking into.

They come from the 2026 RFP Response Trends & Benchmarks Report, a global study of 1,533 companies conducted by Loopio in partnership with the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP). The trends skew North American, but anyone working in Australian procurement will recognise every one of them.

The flood

Start on the buyer's side. Sixty-eight per cent of suppliers say they're receiving more tenders than the year before, and the average bid team now submits 166 formal responses a year, up from 153. Two forces are driving this. Economic pressure makes buyers comparison-shop, when budgets tighten, organisations issue tenders to test the market rather than quietly renewing with the incumbent. And AI has made it dramatically cheaper for procurement teams to draft and issue a tender in the first place.

More tenders sounds like good news for suppliers, and it can be. But every tender now attracts more bidders too, because AI has also made responding cheaper. The market isn't just bigger; it's busier.

The squeeze

On the supplier side, adoption has been staggering. Seventy-nine per cent of bid teams now use generative AI in their response process, up from just 34 per cent two years ago, and among those users, 43 per cent reach for it every single day. Teams are producing more than they ever have.

What hasn't changed is the people. The average bid team has held at roughly eight members since 2021. So the volume is rising, the tools are faster, and the humans are the same, which explains why, for the first time in five years, "having enough bandwidth" has become the number one challenge in the profession, cited by half of all teams and up almost 20 percentage points in a single year. The strain is showing up where it hurts: the share of teams blaming missed timelines for lost bids nearly doubled year on year.

The Australian numbers make that pressure concrete. Across thousands of live tenders tracked in our own database this year, the median response window is just 26 days from release to close, and a quarter of tenders allow 20 days or fewer. That's under a month to decide whether to bid, plan the response, chase down evidence, write, review and submit. Miss the window and there is no second chance.

The paradox

Here's the twist. Everyone is faster, and nobody is winning more. Win rates fell from 45 per cent to 39 per cent this year, the lowest in the seven years of the study. Shortlisting rates dropped from 54 to 46 per cent. And when teams list the benefits they're getting from AI, "improved win rates" barely rates a mention.

Only 13 per cent of teams now blame the quality of their own proposals for their losses, so it isn't that submissions got worse. It's that speed without strategy simply produces more polished losing bids. When every bidder has the same drafting tools, drafting faster stops being an advantage. Activity is up across the industry; advantage isn't.

What evaluators actually see now

Picture the evaluator's desk. More submissions per tender than ever, many of them drafted with the same handful of general-purpose AI tools, and generic, machine-flavoured responses have become instantly recognisable, and instantly cullable. The first cut is now the brutal one.

But the data holds a genuinely encouraging detail: while shortlisting has become harder, the gap between being shortlisted and winning has narrowed to just seven percentage points. In plain terms, if you make the shortlist, your odds of winning are the best they've been. The whole battle has moved to that first cut, and the first cut is won with specificity: evidence, local knowledge, a demonstrated understanding of the buyer's actual problem. Precisely the things a generic AI draft cannot fake, and precisely where a focused smaller business can shine against a template-driven giant.

The quiet security problem

One more number worth sitting with: 57 per cent of bid teams are still running tender content through general-purpose AI chatbots. Convenient, but pasting past tenders, pricing structures and client information into public AI tools is a data-governance risk most boards haven't caught up with, and an especially serious one if you're bidding for government work. It's a big part of why AI use is shifting into purpose-built bid platforms, where the AI works inside a controlled environment on your own content: 43 per cent of teams now take that route, up from 33 per cent a year ago. How you adopt AI is becoming as important as whether you do.

Why disruption favours the newcomer

When a game resets, incumbency is worth less. The suppliers who dominated tendering for the past twenty years built their advantage under the old rules, big teams, big libraries of boilerplate, brute-force capacity. Those assets matter less by the month. What matters now is discipline: choosing the right tenders, proving you understand the buyer, and using AI for analysis and quality rather than volume.

That's a game a well-run smaller business can win. The same study found mid-sized companies that invested in process improvement lifted their submission rates more than anyone, and now earn nearly the same share of revenue from tenders as enterprises many times their size. The playing field hasn't just tilted; for the first time in decades, it's tilting toward the agile.

The suppliers who will own the next decade of contracts are building that muscle right now. The only expensive decision is waiting.

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Scryve, Powered by Tender Relief, will be at The Business Show, ICC Sydney, 25–26 November, stand B472. If you want to understand what AI actually changes about bidding, and what it doesn't, come and have that conversation with our team.

Sources: 2026 RFP Response Trends & Benchmarks Report, Loopio in partnership with APMP; Tender Relief Tender Monitor database, 2026 snapshot of live Australian tender response windows.