Project Overview
BMT partnered with Transparity to create an AI-infused bid management application, empowering their team to navigate extensive project data and craft more competitive proposals. By deploying secure, conversational AI agents and a robust knowledge mining system, BMT streamlined their bidding process, enabling seamless access to relevant insights without compromising sensitive information. This innovative approach not only enhanced productivity and compliance, but also delivered a unique competitive edge, allowing BMT to win new business and leverage Generative AI safely within their customer engagements.
The Challenge
BMT is part of an industry where winning bids can pivot on having the most insightful analysis and presentation of data. Their bidding team needed an edge—a way to sift through extensive archives of project data to craft compelling and informed bids. Though aware of AI’s potential, BMT needed a partner to explore and identify practical AI infused bid management solutions to reinforce their bidding process.
To tackle this challenge, they knew they wanted an iterative approach with the ability to adjust tactics or direction at each step to to stay ahead of changes in the AI landscape.
The Solution
Intelligent Conversational Agent
BMT couldn’t use available public AI bid management offerings due to security and compliance concerns and the need for custom features. The intelligent conversational agent we developed can manage multiple concurrent conversations and users can effortlessly pause and resume dialogues, ensuring no loss of context or continuity when tackling complex tasks.
In addition to conversation management, the intelligent conversational agent is equipped with a metadata feature, allowing users to enrich each interaction with additional information such as project numbers and tags. This function is critical for organising and attributing conversations, facilitating quick retrieval and better data management in future searches.
Knowledge Mining Solution
Next, we needed to explore whether we could develop a knowledge mining solution for navigating a secure, globally distributed document repository. To comply with stringent security protocols and ensure document confidentiality, the system was engineered to disclose the existence of documents matching user queries without revealing their content.
Leveraging advanced natural language processing, the knowledge mining app allows users to conduct searches through conversational queries, responding with relevancy rankings for existing documents. This approach ensures that sensitive information is not compromised during the search process. Users are informed about the presence of relevant documents allowing them to request access.
“As a knowledge-based company, we have been pursuing solutions to use Generative AI to support our customers. The project with Transparity has been an important step in piloting some specific use cases to improve our delivery. Additionally, the pilots have been beneficial in identifying further use cases.
The Impact
The AI-infused bid management solutions are becoming a powerful tool for BMT’s team, who can now navigate and utilise their extensive project data with unprecedented ease and efficiency. BMT is now expanding the project data available to improve proposal writing further.
BMT’s AI journey is far from over. We have already begun the next phase of development, focussing on harnessing the potential of Azure OpenAI for content generation and enhancing conversational chat by bringing BMT’s documents and data into the AI solution.
“Our approach to the security model has also enabled us to work with this innovative technology with our broad range of customers and is providing us with a competitive advantage and some unique selling points. We are already starting to win new work whilst increasing productivity, all while managing the data protection risks inherent with other Generative AI platforms.” — Head of Digital Strategy, BMT
