How a leading AEC Firm gets 3-6 months Ahead of Government RFPs with Ontopical
août 19, 2026Most government projects doesn’t start when the RFP is published. They start months earlier, in board meetings, budget approvals, and funding conversations. Our customer found a way to identify those early signals, understand what agencies were planning, and build relationships well before procurement opened.
Quick Facts
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Earlier Opportunity Discovery
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Recommendation Accuracy
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Qualified Opportunity Flow
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Geographic Coverage
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Projects found 3 to 6 months earlier
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Up to 26% lead acceptance
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500+ opportunities reviewed by one user
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Missouri, Texas, and Georgia from one platform
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The Customer
Our customer is a leading architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firm serving public sector clients across the United States. Its teams work across architecture, MEP engineering, and design-build, with a strong focus on government and institutional markets.
The Challenge
For most AEC firms, the first visible sign of a government project is the RFP. By then, the agency has often spent months planning budgets, defining priorities, shaping requirements, and evaluating potential approaches. The firm wanted to get into those early conversations. The challenge was doing it consistently across hundreds of public agencies without tying up a full-time research team.
Traditional bid platforms didn’t close the gap. They could tell the team when procurement started. They couldn’t consistently tell them what agencies were planning before procurement started.
The team faced four core challenges:
- Projects discovered too late
By the time an RFQ or RFP was published, agencies had already spent months developing their plans and, in some cases, engaging with potential vendors. - Manual research consuming valuable time
Teams were stuck in repetitive searching instead of building relationships and pursuing qualified projects. - High noise, low relevance
Without intelligent filtering, staff spent valuable time on reviewing projects outside their territory, budget range, or service capabilities. - Limited collaboration across teams
Architecture, engineering, marketing, and business development teams often tracked opportunities independently, making it hard to share intelligence and coordinate pursuit strategies.
Shifting Business Development Upstream
Leadership team recognized that winning more government work meant moving from reactive bid chasing to proactive opportunity discovery.
They wanted a platform that could:
- Surface early project signals before RFPs and RFQs
- Deliver highly relevant opportunities based on each user’s markets and services
- Reduce time spent on manual research
- Improve visibility and collaboration across multiple business units
- Turn public sector planning data into actionable, repeatable business intelligence
Ontopical emerged as the solution for making early procurement intelligence a repeatable part of the firm’s business development workflow.
The Solution – Earlier Intelligence without changing the workflow
- Early Opportunity Intelligence
Ontopical continuously reads public planning records, agendas, minutes, capital improvement plans, and budgets, and flags projects three to six months before a solicitation is released. - Focus on the Right Opportunities
Each user gets a weekly set of leads matched to their geography, project type, and service line, so review time goes to work that actually fits. - AI-powered Document Analysis
Ontopical’s AI copilot, Oliver reads dense government documents (up to 725 pages) in 5-10 seconds and pulls out the budgets, timelines, and requirements that matter, so people spend their time deciding instead of skimming. - One Shared Opportunity Pipeline
Instead of multiple teams maintaining separate lists, teams share one view of opportunities and moves qualified prospects straight into their CRM.
The Impact:
- Better Lead Quality
Across all users, the firm accepts about 20% of the leads Ontopical surfaces, with top performing users reaching 26% lead acceptance. - A Real Qualified Pipeline
One user reviewed 502 leads on a normal monthly routine and moved 49 into active pursuit, each cleared for geography, budget, and service fit. That means roughly one in ten signals turned into an opportunity worth chasing. - Wider Market Coverage
As confidence grew, users doubled their weekly leads from 10 to 20 with no drop in relevance. This allowed the team to monitor multiple markets from one platform rather than manually chasing numerous government websites. - Less Time Lost to Research
The weekly review replaced hours of manual digging across agency websites, allowing the team to spend more time on relationships building, qualification, and pursuits strategy.
What’s next
After changing how the team identifies opportunities before procurement begins, the firm is now extending that visibility across the full government contracting lifecycle.
With Ontopical’s Solicitations module added alongside early signals, the team tracks opportunities from the first planning discussion through active RFPs, in one workflow for identifying, qualifying, and pursuing government work.