AI was supposed to make bidding easier. For many suppliers, it's made the job harder.
That's the argument Andrea Scott, Director of Customer Solutions at Civica CGD, makes below. Andrea works with public sector suppliers every day, and she's watched the early productivity gains from AI start to slip as buyers adopt the same tools.
We wanted to test that theory against real numbers. So our research team pulled Stotles data on the UK public sector AI contract market and shared the analysis with Andrea. It covers every AI contract awarded since 2020: how the market has grown, where the money is going, and how fast generative AI tools are moving into government.
Written by Andrea Scott
I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact AI is having on public sector procurement in the UK.
At first, the story felt straightforward. AI gave suppliers a real productivity boost. It became easier to digest tender packs, map requirements, identify gaps and get to a first draft more quickly. For bid teams dealing with long documents and tight timescales, that felt like a genuine breakthrough.
My view is that some of those early gains are already being eroded.
The reason is simple: customers are adopting AI too. And once that happens, behaviour starts to change. If buyers assume suppliers can use AI to interpret material quickly, there is less incentive to simplify the pack, remove duplication or make requirements easier to navigate. In practice, that can mean longer documents, more annexes and more content that still needs careful interpretation.
It can also create a new expectation that responses should come back faster. If drafting looks quicker, timelines can shrink, even though the real work of validating evidence, aligning delivery models, checking legal positions and securing approvals is still very human. Public sector procurement is not just a writing exercise. It is a governance and assurance exercise as well.
For suppliers, I think the risk is that AI does not remove work so much as move it. It reduces time spent on drafting but increases the burden of assurance. Teams still need to check accuracy, validate interpretations and make sure polished language has not disguised weak substance. In some cases, they may also need to explain how AI was used, which adds another layer of effort.
There is a wider market effect too. AI may help smaller suppliers get to a response more efficiently, which should be a good thing. But if the overall burden keeps growing because customers expect more volume, more speed and more evidential depth, the advantage may still sit with larger suppliers that have stronger governance and review capacity. AI could democratise drafting while amplifying advantage for suppliers with larger assurance capacity.
The question that really interests me is what happens next.
Human-in-the-loop oversight is widely accepted as best practice, and for good reason. It preserves accountability, context and judgment. But in procurement, that principle depends on one thing above all: time. If customers assume AI can accelerate every stage, and suppliers respond by industrialising more of their process, the practical room for human review starts to shrink. At that point, the issue is not whether AI is being used responsibly in theory, but whether the timetable still allows responsible use in practice.
The available trend data broadly supports this view, even if it does not prove every part of it.
Dallán Ryan and the team at Stotles, provided me with data analysis, that reports that:
So AI is clearly moving into the mainstream.
There are signs the same shift is happening on the supplier side too.
For me, AI in public sector procurement is no longer just a story about efficiency. It is becoming a story about escalation. As both government and suppliers adopt AI, each side adjusts to the other’s assumed capability.
The risk is that documents grow, expectations rise and timelines compress, while the need for human judgment does not disappear.
If AI were only inflating workload without creating any real value, adoption would probably be slowing down. Instead, organisations keep investing because there is still clear productivity value in it.
So there’s no question that AI creates efficiency, but who captures the time saved as expectations, assurance requirements and response pressures continue to rise?
That is why I think the near-term issue is not whether AI has a role in procurement. It clearly does. The real question is whether procurement is evolving in a way that still leaves enough space for responsible human oversight.
Andrea Scott
Director Customer Solutions, Civica CGD
Andrea Scott is Director of Customer Solutions at Civica CGD, where she oversees bid, pre-sales and revenue operations. She brings over a decade of experience across product development, customer experience and business strategy, working with cross-functional teams to deliver tailored solutions and winning bids for central government and defence clients.
Stotles tracks public sector AI contract awards as they happen, along with the buyers, frameworks and spend patterns shaping the market. If you want to see where the opportunities are before your competitors do, talk to our team about what the numbers show for your sector.
