Introducing OfferGuard: Revolutionizing proposal reviews with AI

In today’s fast-paced business environment, the preparation and review of complex documents like commercial proposals can be a bottleneck. These documents often include intricate solution proposals, commercial terms, limitations, and responsibilities—spanning dozens of pages and requiring meticulous attention to detail. Errors or oversights in these proposals can jeopardize project success, making quality control a critical yet time-consuming task. Enter OfferGuard, an innovative AI-powered tool developed to streamline this process, ensuring consistency and quality without overburdening human resources.

The Genesis of OfferGuard

Traditionally, companies have relied on internal protocols and checklists to ensure proposal quality. Dedicated teams manually reviewed documents for compliance, a process that was not only labor-intensive but also prone to delays—especially when deadlines loomed large. Recognizing this inefficiency, our AI team explored how artificial intelligence, specifically large language models (LLMs), could transform this workflow.

The result? OfferGuard—a smart assistant designed to automate the review of complex proposals. By leveraging AI, OfferGuard reduces the time and pressure on employees while maintaining high standards of accuracy and compliance.

How OfferGuard Works

OfferGuard integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, requiring minimal changes to how teams operate. Here’s a peek into its process:

1. Input: A user uploads a proposal (typically a Word document) via Microsoft Teams, a platform already familiar to most employees.
2. Analysis: OfferGuard scans the document against a predefined checklist of criteria—rules that ensure all necessary elements (e.g., terms, conditions, responsibilities) are present and correctly articulated.
3. Feedback: The bot identifies discrepancies or missing elements, pinpointing specific sections where issues arise. It then suggests corrections and embeds these insights as comments directly into the document.
4. Output: Within minutes (typically under ten), the user receives the annotated document, complete with actionable feedback—ranging from minor tweaks to critical compliance flags.

This process is powered by advanced LLMs, such as GPT-4o, which analyze the document in two stages: a general compliance check followed by a detailed review of each flagged issue. The result is a thorough yet rapid review that rivals human oversight.

Enhancing User Experience

A key design principle behind OfferGuard is minimizing disruption. Rather than requiring constant interaction (like a chatbot), it operates as an agent—taking a task, processing it independently, and delivering results when ready. Users delegate the review to OfferGuard via Teams, freeing them to focus on other priorities while the bot works in the background.

To keep users informed, OfferGuard provides real-time status updates, addressing the long processing times that can arise from analyzing lengthy documents with multiple rules (e.g., 50+ criteria triggering individual LLM calls). This transparency ensures the tool feels responsive, even when handling complex tasks.

Tackling Technical Challenges

Building OfferGuard wasn’t without hurdles. Early iterations struggled with large documents due to LLM context limitations, sometimes overlooking issues or misreferencing text. To overcome this, we adopted a two-pass approach: an initial broad scan to identify issues, followed by a targeted analysis of each problem. For references that can’t be tied to specific paragraphs, comments are added to the document’s start, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.

Hosted on Azure Web App with Microsoft Bot Builder, OfferGuard leverages Azure Bot resources for Teams integration and identity management. Documents are processed directly within Teams’ ecosystem, eliminating the need for external storage solutions like Blob Storage for most use cases.

Beyond Proposals: A Flexible Framework

While OfferGuard currently focuses on commercial proposals, its architecture is highly adaptable. The same principles—checklist-based AI review—can apply to contracts, software documentation, or any process involving structured documents. By integrating with multimodal tools (e.g., for analyzing images, schematics, or tables) or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, OfferGuard could cross-check content against existing documentation or even execute code to validate technical details.

We’re already exploring enhancements like parallel processing to speed up reviews, refining checklists for machine readability, and enabling user dialogue with the bot (e.g., responding to comments or selecting from suggested fixes). The goal? A tool that not only flags issues but also aids decision-making.

The Bigger Picture

OfferGuard exemplifies how AI can democratize intelligence in organizations. Historically, detailed reviews were reserved for high-stakes tasks due to limited human capacity. Now, with AI’s scalability and falling costs (despite numerous API calls, expenses remain trivial compared to human labor), we can apply rigorous oversight to a broader range of processes.

This shift reduces risk—critical in proposals where omissions can lead to costly downstream errors—while freeing skilled employees for higher-value work. Companies that embrace this “AI abundance” will likely outpace competitors, delivering better products faster and with fewer vulnerabilities.

What’s Next?

OfferGuard is already in use by teams preparing proposals, with plans to scale across our organization soon. Future iterations might incorporate larger-context models, multi-agent workflows, or even full automation for less critical reviews. For now, though, it keeps a human in the loop—ensuring final oversight while drastically cutting review times.

In a world where intelligence is increasingly accessible, tools like OfferGuard redefine how we work. By automating the mundane and amplifying human judgment, they pave the way for smarter, more efficient businesses. Stay tuned as we continue to refine and expand this game-changing solution!