Inside Housing – Home – AI revolution? How housing will use artificial intelligence

Ms Rees describes the word-heavy answers demanded by questions such as this as a “proxy for effort”, a way to demonstrate the effort and commitment companies are willing to put into the bidding process. According to Mr Makgill, the advent of large language models means that proxy is now obsolete.“The whole of the public sector has this really weird reliance on text and number of words,” says Mr Makgill. “In the world of AI, all of that is gone. You’re much better off asking, ‘If you are going to respond to this bid, tell me what prompt you would put into ChatGPT,’ and then we can all cut to the chase.”There is an old saying in computing: “garbage in, garbage out”. In other words, the quality of output depends on the quality of input. For large language models, the user’s prompt is the input, and its quality rests to a great extent on the amount of detail and specificity the user includes. According to Mr Makgill’s argument, a bidder’s level of knowledge and expertise will therefore be evident in their prompts; it is the difference between reading bullet points or an entire essay. But it is not a solution in itself, because these AI models can also help their users write better prompts.“The whole of the public sector has this really weird reliance on text and number of words. In the world of AI, all of that is gone. You’re much better off asking, ‘If you are going to respond to this bid, tell me what prompt you would put into ChatGPT,’ and then we can all cut to the chase”Using AI also raises potential issues around data privacy, as the third-party platform may well have ownership of all the data entered in. It is normally assumed that information in tenders will be kept confidential, Ms Rees says, to mitigate risks such as bid-rigging or conflicts of interest.“Bidders will often be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement or confidentiality undertaking,” she explains. “So at the moment, the use of an AI tool is entirely incompatible with that approach.”It is not all bad, though. This technology could strengthen procurement by giving smaller suppliers, which may not have their own in-house bid-writing team or the means to hire bid writers, a cheap and easy way to elevate the quality of their submission. This could increase both the number and quality of bids.After all, if you are a small grounds maintenance firm bidding on the biodiversity tender example, what does the quality of your penmanship have to do with your ability to do the job? “If you’re [a small business] and you’re trying to get up the ladder, AI could be a real help to you as you write your initial draft,” says Mathew Baxter, chief executive and founder of Echelon, a housing procurement consultancy.Bespoke responsesIf large language models are less useful at answering more detailed, case-specific questions, then that could give wary housing organisations a way to subvert their involvement in the bidding process. “It’s quite difficult to use AI to give a bespoke response to a bespoke question,” as Mr Baxter puts it.As well as this shift towards more focused, case-specific questions, the use of these programmes in bid writing could also be undermined by another growing trend: the use of face-to-face meetings during the bidding process.The Procurement Act 2023, which is due to go live in October, gives contracting authorities greater flexibility in how they design their tendering processes. Mr Baxter believes one consequence of this will be much more interaction between suppliers and clients. “It’s got much more emphasis on getting around a table with your bidders to understand the commerciality of their bid, to try and identify risks, and to help form the final solution for delivering that work,” he says. “I don’t see how a contractor could use AI in that process.”Procurement may be changing and developing, but so is technology. AI-focused start-ups have public procurement firmly in their sights, and this niche new sector is moving fast. The chief sponsor of this year’s conference for UK bid-writing professionals was AutogenAI, a British firm that has developed an AI model dedicated to writing bids.“If I thought people were putting in bids using generic large language models with no human input, that would be a terrible thing”Founder and chief executive Sean Williams gave Inside Housing a quick tour of his product. When asked the same question on biodiversity as ChatGPT, the AI’s answer covered similar ground – but its functionality was streets ahead. It generated a string of ideas for the user to choose from and order, each one clearly sourced, before stitching them together according to the user’s preferences: tone, word count, structure.It is not about replacing humans, Mr Williams says, but about augmenting them. “In the same way that a financial modeller uses Excel to write quicker, more sophisticated financial models, our software is used by writers so that they can write more sophisticated, better answers, because they’re able to do a lot of that work faster,” he explains.Publicly available large language models, in comparison, are simply the wrong tool for the job. “If I thought people were putting in bids using generic large language models with no human input, that would be a terrible thing,” he adds. “Fortunately, anyone who does that is just going to get beaten by somebody who’s doing it properly.”Should bid writers acknowledge that they have used AI tools to help prepare their bids? “There’s an obligation on people to be honest about what they’re doing,” Mr Williams says.He acknowledges a wariness about this kind of technology – which might explain why his firm protects its clients’ identities – but that might not be the case for much longer. “Trust me,” he states. “In 12 months’ time, no one is writing bids or tenders without using software like this.”



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