FEATURE


SMARTER RFPs, BETTER DECISIONS


By applying AI narrowly as decision support, not replacement, teams can eliminate bottlenecks, avoid large-scale disruption, and unlock higher-value strategic work, explains Richard Wallace, Chief Commercial Officer of Pearstop.


In the world of facilities management and large-scale technical services, the Request for Proposal (RFP) is often viewed as a necessary evil. For many commercial teams, the process isn’t just manual; it’s exhausting. It is a cycle of frantic coordination, where data is scattered across legacy systems, pricing assumptions are scattered across multiple spreadsheets, and critical institutional knowledge resides only in the heads of a few senior engineers.


The complexity trap The current FM model is inherently reactive. Procurement


34 | TOMORROW’S FM


waits on operations; operations wait on finance; finance asks procurement to recheck assumptions. Every RFP is treated as a one-off project, even if the company has successfully delivered hundreds of similar bids before. This siloed, manual approach creates exhaustion rather than empowerment.


The tragedy is that most teams accept this chaos as the ‘nature of the business’. They believe their data is too messy to fix or that AI is a ‘black box’ that requires relinquishing control. However, in practice, messy data isn't a barrier; it’s the requirement. If the data were


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