Buying AI for public-sector sales: what to ask before you sign

If you've been asked to bring AI into your public-sector sales or estimating team, you'll see a lot of demos that look alike. Every vendor finds bids, every vendor summarizes them, and every vendor has a chat box. The differences that matter show up in the questions below. Ask all of them, of every vendor, including us.

Coverage

How many agencies do you cover, and how do you count them? A count of "sources" can mean portals, each with hundreds of agencies, or single agencies. Ask for agencies.

Can I check my own list? Give the vendor 30 agencies you care about, including small ones, and ask which they cover. Then check those agencies' own bid pages for the last 60 days and compare. This is the most honest coverage test there is, and it takes an afternoon.

How quickly does a new bid appear? Same day, next day or next week makes a real difference on a three-week bid window.

Do you get the addenda? Ask how the vendor finds addenda and how it tells you when one changes something.

Sources

Where does the data come from? You want to hear "the agencies themselves." Ask what happens when an agency only posts on its own website or in a newspaper.

Can I click through to the original? Every opportunity should link to where the agency posted it.

Answers you can check

Does every answer cite its source? Ask to see the document, page and sentence behind any answer. Click through ten at random during the demo.

What happens when the document doesn't say? The right answer is "not stated." Ask the vendor to show you one.

Can we write our own questions? Your team's qualification questions are specific to your work. A fixed set of summary fields won't cover them.

Your data

Is our data used to train models? Get the answer in writing, in the contract.

What of ours do you store, and where? Past bids, win and loss history, price lists and CRM records are sensitive. Ask where they are kept, who can see them and how they are deleted when you leave.

Can we export everything? Reviews, notes and history should leave with you.

Security and access

Single sign-on? SAML through your identity provider, so access is granted and removed in one place.

Roles? Who can change searches, columns and connections, and who can only read.

Audit status? Ask for the SOC 2 report or, if the audit is in progress, where it stands and when it's expected. A vendor that is honest about "in progress" is easier to trust than one that is vague.

Will you complete our security questionnaire? Ask before the pilot, because it often takes longer than the pilot.

Writing to other systems

What does it connect to? CRM, chat and email are the usual ones.

Does anything get written without a person approving it? An AI that creates CRM records or sends messages on its own will eventually create a mess. Look for an approval step on anything that writes outside the tool.

Price and rollout

How is it priced? Per-seat pricing pushes teams to share logins and keep people out. Ask what happens when you add estimators or a new region.

How long until it's useful? Ask what the vendor needs from you, in what order, and who does the setup work.

Can we try it on our own territories first? A demo on the vendor's example data proves very little. Ask for a review built on your columns and your regions.

Our own answers

Since we asked you to put these to us too, here are ours. Capveon checks federal, state and local agencies in the US and Canada, including those that only post on their own website, and every opportunity links to where it was posted. Every answer in a review cites the page and sentence it came from, and says "not stated" when the documents don't say. Your data ranks and qualifies bids for your business only and is never used to train models. Single sign-on is SAML. Anything that writes to another system waits for a person to approve it. It connects to Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Microsoft Teams and email. Seats are unlimited on every plan. Our SOC 2 audit is in progress, and we'll tell you where it stands during your review.

To see how we answer the rest, talk to us. We'll build a review on your territories with your columns, so you can check our answers against your own bids.