Three Years of AI: What the Results Really Show

In August 2024, when AI adoption was still relatively new across the bid and proposal community, Lohfeld Consulting sponsored a LinkedIn poll asking:

“Are you maximizing the benefits of your AI/GenAI implementation?”

We repeated the same poll in 2025 and again in 2026 to track how adoption, maturity, and outcomes have evolved. The results, summarized in Table 1, reveal both meaningful progress and persistent challenges.

Table 1: Are you Maximizing the Benefits of Your AI/GenAI Implementation?

Survey says….	2024	2025	2026
Exceeding expectations	10%	21%	20%
Meeting most needs	10%	22%	22%
Room for improvement	42%	46%	40%
Not meeting expectations	38%	11%	18%

Key Findings

The survey findings have clearly shifted over the past three years.

1. Sharp Decline in AI Failures

In 2024, more than one-third of respondents (38%) reported that AI was not meeting expectations. By 2026, that number dropped to 18%. This significant decline indicates that organizations have moved beyond early experimentation and pilot programs toward more structured and intentional use of AI. However, the slight rebound from 11% in 2025 to 18% in 2026 suggests that as AI use expands into more complex proposal activities, implementation challenges remain.

2. Rising but Plateauing Success Stories

The percentage of respondents reporting that AI exceeded expectations doubled from 10% in 2024 to just over 20% in both 2025 and 2026. While encouraging, this plateau suggests that achieving exceptional results with AI involves more than simply deploying tools. It requires strategy, governance, and training. Teams that invest thoughtfully are seeing strong returns, but widespread excellence has not yet become the norm.

3. The Persistent Middle Ground

The largest group of respondents continues to report room for improvement, hovering between 40% and 46% across all three years. This reflects a common reality: while AI tools have improved rapidly, challenges persist. We have seen challenges in knowledge management, workflow integration, and user proficiency.

4. Stabilization at “Meeting Most Needs”

The percentage of respondents who said AI is meeting most needs doubled from 10% in 2024 to 22% in 2025 and remained steady in 2026. This suggests many teams have reached a level of stability but not acceleration; AI is helping, but it has not yet delivered the steep gains organizations may have anticipated.

How Can We Improve the Implementation of AI Use?

With roughly 40% of respondents still reporting room for improvement, the following best practices can help organizations maximize the value of their AI investments.

1. Identify the Right Use Cases

AI delivers the greatest value when applied strategically, such as draft content generation, compliance matrices, question development, and risk analysis. Avoid forcing AI into areas that require deep customer insight, negotiation, or competitive positioning.

2. Invest in Team Training

Effective use of AI requires more than basic familiarity with tools—structured training in prompt engineering, evaluator expectations, and AI limitations is essential. Lohfeld Consulting’s GenAI for Proposal Professionals course goes beyond operating tools to teach capture and proposal execution using GenAI through hands-on exercises. Well-trained users are far more likely to produce evaluator-ready content.

3. Establish Guardrails for Accuracy and Security

AI can introduce risk if not properly controlled. Organizations must implement clear policies for fact-checking, protecting sensitive data, and ensuring regulatory compliance. Strong governance builds trust in AI-generated outputs and protects critical information.

4. Integrate AI into Proposal Workflows

AI delivers the most value when embedded into proven proposal processes. Using AI for RFP analysis, question generation, risk mitigation, and quality control enhances consistency and supports evaluator confidence.

5. Foster Human–AI Collaboration

AI should augment, not replace, human expertise. Encourage SMEs, writers, and managers to use AI to accelerate routine tasks while retaining ownership of strategy, storytelling, and customer alignment.

6. Measure and Refine ROI

Track time savings, quality improvements, and win-rate impacts tied to AI usage. Regularly measuring return on investment (ROI) enables leadership to make informed decisions about scaling, refining, or redirecting AI initiatives.

Conclusion

Three years of polling reveal how far the bid and proposal industry has come in adopting AI and how much opportunity remains. Fewer teams are struggling, more are achieving strong results, and the majority recognize clear paths for improvement. The takeaway is clear: successful AI adoption is not about tools alone. It depends on training, structured processes, and disciplined implementation. If you need AI implementation assistance, training, or would like to engage AI-trained proposal consultants, contact us.

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By Brenda Crist, Vice President at Lohfeld Consulting Group, MPA, CPP APMP Fellow

Lohfeld Consulting Group has proven results specializing in helping companies create winning captures and proposals. As the premier capture and proposal services consulting firm focused exclusively on government markets, we provide expert assistance to government contractors in Capture Planning and Strategy, Proposal Management and Writing, Capture and Proposal Process and Infrastructure, and Training. In the last 3 years, we’ve supported over 550 proposals winning more than $170B for our clients—including the Top 10 government contractors. Lohfeld Consulting Group is your “go-to” capture and proposal source! Start winning by contacting us at www.lohfeldconsulting.com and join us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube^(TM).