Wiia helps consulting companies make the bidding process easier, using AI to remove pain points in tenders.
My background has for years been in advising international consultancy firms for their bids. Yet throughout my work with such bids, I could not believe how much time was wasted or poorly spent on tender processes.
An average of 200 hours were spent on each bid at a cost of about £20,000, with an average loss rate of 80% (8 times out of 10, a bid is a losing one)! I decided to found Wiia in 2021, to solve this problem.
What is your background – what expertise do you bring to Wiia?
My background is in international development and project finance. I have spent 15 years designing, financing and executing large tenders in construction, engineering, and infrastructure.
Having prepared hundreds of these projects and evaluated thousands of bids, I know what global agencies expects from bidders, and I know the challenges faced by consultancies. As a result, I am now well-positioned to elevate the value proposition of their bids and benefiting the final beneficiaries through better crafted projects.
How does Wiia work – how does it utilise AI, how does is analyse tender documents, how does it help win more contracts?
Wiia utilises AI applied to text, through Natural Language Processing. We scan text to extract the content that is useful for tenders. I like to say that Wiia is the “Tinder of Tenders”, matching text-based content from the calls for tender issued by global agencies, to the consultancies’ data used for the bids.
First, we analyse the tender opportunities and extract key requirements in a one-page summary. We go through thousands of tenders daily, reducing the process for each tender from 1 hour to around 3 minutes; second, we match consultancies’ data with what we extracted from the tender.
Over 150 hours on average are thus saved in the search process. Finally, we facilitate the bid creation process, by auto-populating bid templates with the selected data. So far, we have managed to reduce the overall process time by 34% – a number we aim to improve on.
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You’re passionate about revolutionising the tender bidding process – if you are successful, what impact could this have?
The ‘territory’ of online procurement and tenders is currently unclaimed and un-monetized. Yet it is a sector ripe for expansion: It’s all about efficiency, and consultancies need to be lased-focused and extremely selective. We remove the pain of scrolling through large amounts of unstructured data by providing a solution that automatically matches the most relevant information in the database with the requirements from the tender.
This changes the mindset of staff, who become more motivated because they know they have a higher chance of winning the selected bids; it increases well-being at work because consultants are motivated to work on higher-value activities rather than administrative tasks, and it boosts staff retention because it creates a positive environment for experts to leverage their know-how into projects that is matched to their experience.
What does the future hold for Wiia – does the technology have applications outside of international development?
To ensure impact and performance, we decided to start with a very focused approach, targeting international tenders on one hand, and construction, engineering, and infrastructure on the other hand.
This, however, is just the beginning. We plan to expand to tenders for other clients within the construction, engineering, and infrastructure industry. There are more than 250,000 projects in the industry that are tendered by other agencies, either at the national level (e.g. highway authorities) or at the regional level (e.g. regional councils).
Beyond this, our approach and our algorithms could be applied to other sectors including education, health care, agriculture and more. We aim to change the tender game, sector by sector, client by client, to make sure that there is a match for every tender in the world.
