Government contractors are increasingly looking to artificial intelligence to streamline capture and proposal development, hoping to increase their win rate. However, AI cannot streamline these processes without a strong foundation and user buy-in. Sam Cooper, senior solutions engineer at Procurement Sciences AI, discussed the pillars of successful AI integration during the AI Adoption in GovCon: Proven Strategies to Drive Buy-In and Results webinar last week, co-hosted by GovConWire.
Why Does GovCon Struggle to Integrate AI for Business Development?
Organizations struggle to adopt AI for three key reasons: market saturation, user frustration and disrupted momentum. AI for proposal development has been increasingly sought after by GovCon organizations, leading to a seemingly unlimited variety of platforms and solutions to choose from. The main issue with these platforms is that many, in attempting to specialize, have limited generative capabilities too much, restricting the tool to limited workflows and output possibilities. Choosing the correct platform means evaluating for best-fit into your unique organization rather than solely looking at what the technology can offer.
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The most important driver of adoption is momentum, enabling teams to remain steadily enthusiastic and bought-in to integrating AI into their daily workflows. User frustration directly inhibits momentum, and stems from getting stuck without proper support, a lack of AI education or attempting to change their proven processes around a tool rather than enhancing the processes that work.
What Are the Five Drivers of Success in AI Adoption?
Cooper, an expert on AI for procurement, discussed the top drivers for effective AI adoption. The strategy he outlined capitalizes on eliminating “friction” — causes of frustration, hindrance and stagnation — to enable an environment for continuous momentum.
Below are the top five drivers for successful adoption:
Ensure Proper Support Resources
Failure to implement AI is often caused by a lack of resources for support. Tackling user frustration starts with a dedicated and knowledgeable support team — and not just another digital chatbox. Cooper shared that users who are struggling with AI are not satisfied with turning to another AI tool for support. The ability to speak to a human when troubleshooting AI tools goes a long way in driving adoption, not just by demonstrating the features, but, more critically, ensuring users do not encounter friction that stalls adoption momentum.
Users must understand how AI works and how it does what it does, again, to build trust and buy-in. Frustrations often stems from confusion — providing employees the time and resources to gain a foundational education on AI can position teams for better adoption. Users should also understand hallucinations and why they happen because when hallucinations occur, a lack of understanding can breed doubt. A basic understanding of AI can support your team’s enthusiasm and maintain momentum in adoption.
Build a Foundation of Trust
With AI for business development increasingly sought after, there are dozens of platforms to choose from. Ensuring the platform used produces verifiable output is essential to establishing the trust that will fuel buy-in throughout the organization. Cooper, who works with GovCon companies to implement AI every day, shared a key lesson learned stating, “User trust in the AI is directly tied to how transparent that AI tool is.”
The AI tool should provide source citations in all outputs, showing where each piece of information was obtained. Not only is this important to ensure products created with AI are accurate and reliable, giving teams confidence in their work product, but supports adoption by enabling users to build trust with the tool. Users want to know they can count on the AI to support them and make them more efficient, not slow them down by adding blind fact-checking or extra analysis to their plate.
The relationship between humans and AI should be optimized, not overlooked. Human guidance and feedback is essential for AI to truly work for an organization, enabling it to understand business development strategy, organizational voice and customer intimacy — but AI still struggles with nuance.
“In the AI era, expertise is actually more important than it ever was before,” Cooper said. “The way that our customers are winning is through telling great stories, building compelling value propositions, building winning proposals — the only difference with AI is that they are able to do it in less time and they’re able to run more thorough processes to effect success with less resources.”
Integrate AI Into Established Processes, Don’t Replace the Process
It is important to acknowledge that AI is not a process, but a tool that can streamline established processes. When it comes to integrating AI into a business development process, there needs to be enough flexibility from the platform to fit into the organization’s proven processes rather than expecting users to mold to the tool. Every organization approaches business development uniquely, with processes that work for their position and their team, the webinar revealed.
Mitigating disruption to that process is critical to adoption. Approaching implementation with this mindset will help leaders choose the best platform for their teams, and drive adoption in a user-centric manner.
“We really want to reduce friction in people’s day-to-day lives with AI. That’s the goal,” expressed Cooper. “If we can get people excited about it, if we can show them that ‘ah-ha’ moment with AI, you know, they’re hooked.”
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Top-Down Approach: Leadership Is Essential
At times, it may be that employees present use cases to leadership, excited to implement AI into their daily roles. However, as Cooper explains, adoption is more effective when driven by leadership. Setting and communicating clear milestones and expectations around AI use within workflows or responsibilities establishes a strong basis for implementation, ensuring users have the guidance they need. Leaders have the opportunity to set the strategy for AI adoption, outlining its use in processes, phases of implementation and quantifiable goals accompanied by accountability levers to ensure users move forward together.
Start Small: Crawl, Walk, Run
When it comes to a continuously evolving and exciting technology like AI, it is understandable that people are excited to integrate every new capability, but too much at once can distract teams from their use goals and overwhelm them. To keep momentum continuous, it is important to avoid users feeling frustrated or stuck. Cooper explained Psci.ai’s strategy of “crawl, walk, run” — starting small to win at scale.
Psci.ai starts with low-risk products, such as customer research, summarization or opportunity qualification to inform a proposal, not yet allowing AI to make changes to business content. This allows users to see early value and build trust with small wins, or usable outputs. Next, “walk” entails outputs like structured document analysis, content drafting and section review. Finally, teams can “run”, fully confident in their skill to integrate the tool into their workflows at scale.
AI has the potential to transform GovCon business development, but only when adoption is grounded in trust, transparency and a strong support system that reduces friction rather than creating it. Organizations that integrate AI into established processes, invest in user education and lead implementation from the top down are far more likely to sustain momentum and drive meaningful results. By starting small, building confidence and scaling intentionally, Cooper argued GovCon teams can unlock greater efficiency, stronger proposals and improved win rates.
