Inside Microsoft's RFP Overhaul: How AI Helped—but Didn’t Replace—the Humans
The thing about RFPs? They’re time-consuming, messy, and usually land in your inbox when you least expect them. At Microsoft, where sales teams handle huge enterprise deals daily, the pressure to respond fast—and flawlessly—is constant. But in early 2025, something quietly shifted.
That’s when Microsoft started rolling out Responsive, a tool that blends classic content management with a dose of generative AI. And while it’s not magic, it’s changing how thousands of salespeople and proposal writers handle one of the most stressful parts of their job: the first draft.
RFPs used to bog down sales
A few years back, responding to RFPs was just… part of the job. Sales reps had to juggle writing proposals alongside closing deals. Not ideal. The result? Less time with customers and too many near-identical answers being rewritten from scratch.
So in 2020, Microsoft did something smart: they built a dedicated proposal team. Their job was twofold—tackle high-stakes bids directly, and help the rest of the company scale up through shared tools and templates.
And as the workload kept growing, that team turned to automation. Slowly at first. But by early 2025, they were ready to go live with AI.
AI helps with the grunt work
Here’s how it works now: Responsive pulls from a massive internal library—more than 20,000 documents, curated over five years—and uses GenAI to suggest draft answers. Not just one or two lines, either. We’re talking full responses, drawn from SharePoint pages, past bids, and technical docs. The result? What used to take hours can now be done in minutes.
In many cases, reps now click once and get an entire draft filled out for them. Of course, they still have to review it. But the heavy lifting? That’s mostly handled.
In test runs, the tool cut down first-draft time by roughly 93%. Not bad.
It's not all smooth sailing
Rolling out AI in a company like Microsoft means jumping through hoops—lots of them. There were internal reviews for security, accessibility, responsible AI, legal compliance… the works. That slowed things down.
And once the system was live, another issue cropped up: some people got lazy. They started relying too much on what the AI gave them. That’s risky. Especially when it comes to legally sensitive phrases or exact wording that needs to stay intact.
To prevent slip-ups, Microsoft and the Responsive team added a system of tags—marking phrases that must appear exactly as written. Those sections? The AI can’t touch them. It's a safeguard, and it matters.
Culture shift, not just tech upgrade
What’s interesting here isn’t just the time saved. It’s how the role of the proposal team has changed. Instead of chasing down wording or formatting questions, they’re spending more time fine-tuning strategies, thinking through positioning, and customizing responses to fit client needs.
And that’s kind of the point. AI isn’t replacing proposal writers—it’s giving them more room to do higher-level work.
It also nudged a bigger cultural shift. Teams are being encouraged to experiment. Try, fail, adjust. Leaders are pushing for more proactive use of tech, instead of waiting for top-down mandates. The ones closest to the RFP process—the folks actually doing the work—are driving the change.
For Microsoft, it’s less about flashy AI demos and more about building a process that works, day after day, across regions and teams. And by the looks of it, they’re getting there—one draft at a time.