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Turn how your best pitch writers work into a step-by-step AI workflow, then spend the saved time making each pitch stand out
Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel
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Reported by Ben Lee on stage at aiblLIVE London (Oct 20, 2026): Bidwells' pitch win rate rose from 40% to 60% in a year, and pitch preparation went from two weeks to ten minutes or a few hours.
Most firms that write pitches or tender responses lose weeks to research and assembly, then have no time left to make the pitch different. Bidwells flipped that.
Bidwells is a 187-year-old UK real estate adviser with about 600 people. Ben Lee, its Head of AI for three years, had the firm's own pitch experts build the workflow. First they captured knowledge from documents and transcribed workshops with their best pitch people, asking why they make each decision. Then they mapped the process live with those experts so they could correct it. Finally they placed agents at each decision: a document analyst reads the tender line by line, a research assistant researches the client, an assembler builds the document the way partners like it, and a quality assessor reviews it like the firm's best reviewer. It runs as 21 linked steps. Lee credits the win-rate gain to time, not volume: the team now spends the saved effort on making each pitch distinctive, for example with designers or video.
By Ben Lee (Bidwells), at aiblLIVE London, Former Head of AI, Bidwells (co-founder of Instruction since 2026) · aibl case study page: AI bid writing at Bidwells: from two weeks to ten minutes (aiblLIVE London session) ↗ · Oct 20, 2026
Run it before your 10am
- Pick one pitch or tender type you write often and pull your best recent examples.
- Run a recorded workshop with your best pitch writers. Ask why they make each decision, not just what they do. Transcribe it.
- Have AI turn the transcript into a step-by-step process map, and let the experts correct it live.
- Give each key decision its own AI step: read the tender line by line, research the client, assemble the draft in your house style, review it against your best reviewer's standards.
- Test each step against a simple scoring rubric before you trust it on a live pitch.
- Put the saved days into what makes the pitch stand out (design, video, a sharper point of view) and track your pitch win rate.
You are reviewing a pitch the way our best reviewer would. Here is the tender or brief: [paste]. Here is our draft response: [paste]. Here is how our best reviewer judges a pitch: [paste the criteria from your expert workshop]. 1) List every requirement in the brief and mark it answered, partly answered or missing, quoting our line. 2) Score the draft 1 to 10 on each reviewer criterion, with the exact sentence that cost points. 3) Name the one thing in this draft that no competitor could also say. If there is none, say so.
If you lead a team
- Let your best pitch people build the workflow, not IT alone.
- Measure pitch win rate, and make sure the saved days go into the pitch, not into more pitches.
Watch out for
- Figures are as Ben Lee stated them on stage; the session write-up is by aibl, the event organiser, and the full PDF is behind a short form.
- Lee credits the gain to time reinvested in making pitches distinctive, not to AI writing the pitch alone; other changes over the year may also have helped.
- Lee has since left Bidwells and co-founded Instruction, which uses these methods with clients.
- The instructions are the value: if your experts do not shape and check each step, you get generic pitches faster.
- What I'd have my team try first: one recorded workshop with your best pitch writer and an AI review step on your next live pitch.
Source: aibl case study page on Ben Lee's aiblLIVE London session (Efficiency track, Oct 20, 2026), plus aibl's LinkedIn post of his quote the same day ("We are winning more pitches, gone from 40 to 60% in a year"). Customer: Bidwells. Platform named on the page: Cassidy. Results are as reported; we did not measure them.
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