An AI RFP in procurement is a request for proposal where AI handles the work procurement used to do by hand: drafting the questions, suggesting suppliers, collecting responses and scoring bids against weighted criteria. People still set the requirements and choose the winner.

RFP is one of the RFx event types, alongside requests for information and quotes. AI changes how much effort each one takes, which changes how often teams bother to run them.

What parts of an RFP can AI handle?

AI can take on most of the admin around an RFP. The judgement calls stay with the procurement team.

1. Building the questionnaire. AI drafts questions from a plain-language brief, such as “we need a payroll provider for 400 staff across the UK and Germany”.

2. Checking the questions. AI flags questions that overlap, lean towards one supplier or won’t produce comparable answers.

3. Finding suppliers. AI suggests suppliers and contacts based on the category, past purchases and past outcomes, such as a supplier that failed a security review last time.

4. Running the event. Reminders, supplier questions and deadlines run inside one portal instead of an email thread.

5. Scoring responses. AI scores each response against the weighted criteria and shows how confident it is in each score.

6. Comparing price. AI lines up pricing across suppliers, including multi-year and total-cost views, and can check it against market benchmarks.

Why do AI RFPs matter for procurement teams?

Most company spend never goes through a competitive process. Running an RFP by email and spreadsheet takes weeks, so procurement saves it for the biggest purchases and waves the rest through.

AI cuts the cost of running an event. When a sourcing event takes days rather than weeks, it becomes worth running for mid-sized purchases and renewals that previously went straight to the incumbent supplier. More spend gets competed, and the team doesn’t grow.

What’s the difference between an AI RFP and autonomous sourcing?

An AI RFP is a human-run event with AI doing the heavy lifting at each step. Autonomous sourcing goes further: the system runs most of the event itself, choosing suppliers, scoring and sometimes negotiating within limits a person set up in advance.

Most teams start with AI RFPs on categories where they want to keep a close eye on every decision, and use more autonomy for repeat, well-defined purchases that otherwise wouldn’t be competed.

What should you watch out for?

AI scoring is a starting point for reviewers. Check low-confidence scores by hand, and look at any response where the AI score and the reviewer’s gut feeling disagree. Watch human scores too: an incumbent can score well on the strength of the relationship without answering the question, and AI is good at spotting that.

Keep a record of how scores were reached. If a losing supplier challenges an award, or an auditor asks why a supplier won, you need to show the criteria, the weightings and who signed off.

How does Omnea handle AI RFPs?

Omnea Sourcing puts RFx events inside the procurement workflow, so they can start automatically when a request crosses a spend, category or risk threshold. Nobody has to remember to run one. Teams set those triggers in the no-code Workflow Builder.

Agents in Omnea’s Agentic Operating System (aOS) then build the event. They draft the brief from the request, shortlist suppliers on fit and history, and create questionnaires from your templates, policies or a prompt. Because the shortlist draws on your history, a supplier that failed a security review on an earlier event isn’t invited again by mistake. Omnea AI flags gaps and duplicated questions, suppliers can pre-fill answers from their own documents, and supplier questions are collated in one place.

When responses arrive, AI scores each one with its confidence and reasoning next to the human scores, and points reviewers to the questions where suppliers differ most. Teams can run second rounds and compare complex pricing like for like, and every score is recorded with who scored what and why, ready for audit.

Teams decide how closely they review each event. For tail spend, agents can run the whole event with two human touchpoints: reviewing what the agents built before launch, and approving the award recommendation.

“Beyond the direct savings paying for the project many times over, there’s now far less resource pressure on our teams and DeepL is able to rapidly adopt the latest technologies to drive growth.”

Martino Cadoni, CFO, DeepL

FAQs

Can AI write an RFP?

General purpose generative AI can write a solid first draft of an RFP from a short brief, including the questions, scoring criteria and pricing template. But, it won’t know your must-have requirements, past supplier problems. or internal policies until told. Embedded sourcing capabilities (like those in Omnea) works from your own templates drawing on existing context from past events.

Does AI choose the winning supplier in an RFP?

In an AI RFP, AI scores and ranks the responses, and a person makes the award. Some teams let AI shortlist suppliers or recommend a winner for low-value, repeat purchases. For strategic or high-risk categories, the final decision stays with the procurement team and the budget holder.

Is an AI RFP the same as e-sourcing?

No. E-sourcing moves the RFP process online, replacing email with a portal, but people still do the work. An AI RFP adds AI to that work: drafting questions, suggesting suppliers and scoring responses. Most modern sourcing tools combine both, so the question to ask a vendor is which steps the AI actually does.