Generative AI accelerates and refines the B2B procurement process but the RFP persists as a roadblock

As generative AI transforms early-stage vendor discovery and shortlisting, the traditional RFP remains essential for strategic purchases, emphasising the enduring need for evidence, transparency, and disciplined decision-making in high-stakes procurement.

In boardrooms and procurement war rooms the B2B buying journey is being rewritten. Generative AI that once felt experimental now sits at the centre of vendor discovery, compressing weeks of research into an afternoon o...

f structured prompts, side‑by‑side comparisons, and draft recommendations. Yet when purchases are strategic, multi‑year software licences, logistics networks or regulated services, the process still funnels into a familiar bottleneck: the request for proposal. That friction is not mere bureaucratic inertia; it is how risk is priced, how accountability is documented, and how committees align when the stakes are high.

According to a report by Responsive, generative AI has overtaken traditional search for a quarter of B2B buyers and nearly two‑thirds of buyers now use AI as much as or more than search when researching vendors. Similar findings from Digital Commerce 360 show two‑thirds of buyers relying on generative AI tools as much as or more than traditional search, while DesignRush and Demand Gen Report report comparable shifts in discovery behaviour. These studies underline a clear pattern: AI reshapes the path to an RFP but does not replace the RFP itself.

How AI changes visibility and the early phase of buying
Visibility once meant ranking in search results or owning a narrative; it now also means being referenced in the right places with consistent, extractable claims. Buyers increasingly triangulate across product documentation, public security statements and third‑party reviews, then use AI tools to reconcile contradictions. A vendor that claims “fast deployment” but lacks published deployment patterns, project plans or role expectations will lose ground to a competitor that supplies concrete templates and proof points.

The practical effect is prompt‑led shortlisting. Procurement teams can ask for “the top platforms for regulated data retention with EU hosting and SOC 2 Type II” and iteratively refine constraints such as ERP compatibility and implementation timelines. That speed raises expectations: vendors must be legible to machines, structured product data, clear pricing logic, and machine‑readable security attestations increase the odds of being surfaced and shortlisted.

RFPs remain the point where claims become commitments
For big contracts the RFP persists because it creates a defensible record: why a supplier was chosen, how risk was evaluated, and which requirements are non‑negotiable. Procurement, legal, security and finance rely on traceability and auditability. Industry data shows most buying decisions begin well before a vendor hears from a prospect, yet when a deal spans millions, multiple geographies or sensitive data, informal evaluation is not enough. The RFP is where narrative yields to evidence: control mappings, redacted audit reports delivered under NDA, implementation milestones tied to remedies, and scenario‑based pricing that survives stress testing.

Automation scales procurement, but human oversight still matters
AI accelerates repeatable tasks, drafting category‑specific clauses, normalising supplier responses, extracting commitments from long narratives and building comparison tables. Many organisations now generate tailored RFPs from historical contract terms, risk profiles and business outcomes, saving time that can be reinvested in stakeholder alignment and supplier validation. According to Intent Amplify, interest in AI across the buyer journey is high, yet many organisations lag in putting AI into production, highlighting a gap between capability and governance.

Automation can mislead if criteria are poorly designed. Overweighting feature breadth can favour complex platforms that are costly to deploy; underweighting change management can select technically superior solutions that fail in adoption. Procurement teams must therefore define what “good” means, validate scoring models and retain human judgment where nuance, regulatory interpretation and organisational risk tolerance matter.

What vendors must do differently
The winners are not necessarily the loudest marketers but those who turn machine‑readable proof into human‑trustable answers: security attestations mapped to controls, implementation plans tied to outcomes, scenario pricing and references that stand up under scrutiny. Sales processes must shift toward evidence‑first responses: sandbox demonstrations, sample statements of work, redacted SOC reports and clear staffing and escalation assumptions.

Many vendors are building RFP centres of excellence to maintain a single source of truth for capabilities, security controls and legal positions. That discipline treats every RFP answer as a potential future dispute: precise inclusion and exclusion language, explicit assumptions and artefacts that back claims are trust signals buyers now prize.

Committees, accountability and the final call
AI can summarise, compare and recommend, but it cannot own accountability. Committees still balance competing priorities, security wants control, finance wants predictability, operations wants reliability, and the business wants outcomes, and organisations must be able to explain who approved what and why. To manage this, some firms formalise AI outputs as decision support rather than decision authority, requiring named stakeholders to approve final scoring and insisting on cited sources and auditable processes.

Trust signals that are hard to fake, third‑party audits, candid customer references, incident postmortems, transparent roadmaps and experienced implementation partners, now carry extra weight in an environment saturated with AI‑generated content. Committees also use AI to run “what‑if” analyses that align stakeholders around risk and value rather than leaving the outcome to competing opinions.

The lasting insight for 2026
AI compresses time‑to‑clarity and reshapes discovery, but organisations do not buy technology; they buy confidence. The RFP endures because it is where structure meets proof and where accountability is formed. Automation makes diligence faster and more consistent, but it also tightens scrutiny: gaps, contradictions and vague claims are easier to detect and harder to defend. In that world the advantage goes to vendors and buyers who organise around evidence, transparency and disciplined decision‑making.

Source: Noah Wire Services