AI Infused Bid Management Application for BMT

About BMT

BMT is a maritime-orientated high-end design house and technical consulting firm driven by a passion for solving complex, real-world problems. From initial concept through to design, construction, operation, and eventual decommissioning, BMT supports customers at every stage of the project lifecycle.

The challenge

BMT is part of an industry where winning bids can pivot on having the most insightful analysis and presentation of data. Their bidding team needed an edge—a way to sift through extensive archives of project data to craft compelling and informed bids. Though aware of AI’s potential, BMT needed a partner to explore and identify practical AI-driven solutions to reinforce their bidding process.

To tackle this challenge, they knew they wanted an iterative approach. The ability to adjust tactics or direction with each step to make sure they didn’t step too far only to find they’d missed the mark because the AI landscape had changed.

The solution

Intelligent Conversational Agent   

BMT couldn’t use the available public offering due to security and compliance concerns and the need for custom features. The intelligent conversational agent we developed can manage multiple concurrent conversations, users can effortlessly pause and resume dialogues, ensuring no loss of context or continuity when tackling complex tasks.

In addition to conversation management, the intelligent conversational agent is equipped with a metadata feature, allowing users to enrich each interaction with additional information such as project numbers and tags. This function is critical for organising and attributing conversations, facilitating quick retrieval and better data management in future searches.

Knowledge Mining Solution

Next, we needed to explore whether we could develop a knowledge mining solution for navigating a secure, globally distributed document repository. To comply with stringent security protocols and ensure document confidentiality, the system was engineered to disclose the existence of documents matching user queries without revealing their content.

Leveraging advanced natural language processing, the knowledge mining app allows users to conduct searches through conversational queries, responding with relevancy rankings for existing documents. This approach ensures that sensitive information is not compromised during the search process. Users are informed about the presence of relevant documents Allowing them to request access. 

The outcome

The AI solutions are becoming a powerful tool for BMT’s bidding team, who can now navigate and utilise their extensive project data with unprecedented ease and efficiency.  BMT is now expanding the project data available to improve the proposal writing further.

BMT’s AI journey is far from over. We have already begun the next phase of development, focussing on harnessing the potential of Azure OpenAI for content generation. As well as better conversational chat by bringing in BMT’s documents and data into the AI solution.

“As a knowledge-based company, we have been pursuing solutions to use Generative AI to support our customers.  The project with Transparity has been an important step in piloting some specific use cases to improve our delivery.  Additionally, the pilots have been beneficial in identifying further use cases. 

“With the support of Transparity and Microsoft, we have now successfully scaled and implemented Generative AI into BMT and are actively using this technology with our customers. 

“Our approach to the security model has also enabled us to work with this innovative technology with our broad range of customers and is providing us with a competitive advantage and some unique selling points.  We are already starting to win new work whilst increasing productivity, all while managing the data protection risks inherent with other Generative AI platforms.” – Head of Digital Strategy, BMT