We are often asked how we use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Tenderlake and what tangible benefits our clients experience. In this article we provide examples on how we use AI and some of the key benefits.
We are often asked how we use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Tenderlake and what tangible benefits our clients experience. In this article we provide examples on how we use AI and some of the key benefits.
Why is AI important?
AI is really important in what we do as it enables our customers to identify more relevant opportunities, and spend less time doing so.
Some of our key objectives for our use of AI are
A local council may want to buy a solution to obesity problems and improve health and well-being in their local area. But how does this match up with a supplier who offers a social prescribing solution.
There is no CPV Category for social prescribing, and even if there was, the local council might classify a procurement using very generic CPV codes such as Health and social work services (8500000), Other community, social and personal services (9800000) or one of the more than one hundred CPV codes actually used to classify social prescribing in the UK.
A similar situation exists in many other areas and it looks like it is a growing issue. Buyers often want to buy a solution or secure an outcome, but CPV Codes usually describe the supplies, services or works to be delivered, not an actual solution or outcome.
Tenderlake uses AI to match potential suppliers with contracts – even when buyers and suppliers are not using the same vocabulary or classifications to describe the same services.
Learning from feedback
One of the very effective ways we tackle the above challenges is by having users give feedback on the relevance of the notices Tenderlake identifies for them.
The feedback is simple: Relevant or Not Relevant, and it provides an almost instant effect.
After only a few pieces of feedback, our AI modules start to form a better understanding of what type of contracts the user is looking for. Importantly they also quickly understand the vocabulary buyers use to describe their requirements and what additional CPV Codes they use.
The effect is often dramatic. Using the feedback mechanism, we can safely predict if an opportunity that wasn’t matched buy any of the users searches for CPV Codes and free text, is actually a good match.
Our average hit-rate is 88% (and improving) meaning that when we identify ten contract opportunities for users that were NOT matched by their traditional searches, almost nine of them turns out to actually be relevant for the user’s organisation. This simply leads to more opportunities that would otherwise have been missed.
As a by-product of the above, we also automatically learn new relevant CPV-categories as soon as they are introduced.
Learning from your website and marketing materials
When a user wants to find relevant contract opportunities, the first task is often to explain to an online service (such as Tenderlake) what the organisation offers.
But as most organisations have already done this on their website and in their marketing materials, we wondered if we couldn’t reuse the time and effort already invested in creating these materials.
The result is Tenderlake Genius – a service that can read an organisation’s web pages or marketing documents describing what an organisation offers and use it to continuously identify relevant contract opportunities.
It is a powerful solution that helps organisations identify relevant opportunities without first having to translate your products and services into a public procurement vocabulary. Tenderlake’s AI takes care of that.
Learn more about Tenderlake Genius.
Learning from previous contracts
For organisations who have previously submitted bids or won contracts, Tenderlake makes it easy to constantly identify similar opportunities.
Simply point out a handful of contracts you would like to find more of and Tenderlake instantly creates a rule that identifies similar opportunities when they appear.
This is also an effective solution when introducing new products or services. Simply identify a small number of historical contracts you would have considered bidding for, had you been offering your new products and services when they were open, and Tenderlake instantly learns to identify similar opportunities when they are published.
Learn more about using historical contracts to find new contracts.