Procurement portals
Official tender sources, such as SAM.gov, Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, AusTender or CanadaBuys, plus state and local portals.
AI automation
Government tender monitoring with AI: how it works
With automated tender monitoring, a bot checks public procurement portals every day and brings back the tenders that match your keywords. AI then reads each one and summarizes the scope, deadlines, value and requirements. Your team stops digging through portals and starts the day with a short list of opportunities, already summarized. This is one of mindmove.ai's real cases, used by 14 companies in Brazil.
How it's usually done by hand
Businesses that sell to government usually have someone who spends part of the day logging into portal after portal, searching their terms and opening tender after tender to see whether it's worth pursuing. It's repetitive, tiring and easy to do halfway on a busy day.
The cost shows up two ways: hours spent searching and reading, and missed opportunities. A tender published on a Friday can have a short deadline, and if nobody sees it in time, the company never gets to compete.
Example: if one person spends 2 hours a day searching and reading tenders, that's about 44 hours a month. With automated monitoring delivering a summarized list every morning, that person can spend the time writing bids instead.
How the automation works, step by step
- 1
Defining keywords
The company sets the terms for its field, the regions and the buyers it cares about. This is what separates signal from noise.
- 2
Daily sweep
A bot checks the portals every day and brings back new tenders that match the keywords.
- 3
AI reading and summary
AI reads each tender found and summarizes scope, buyer, estimated value, dates and requirements.
- 4
Organized delivery
Tenders arrive in a platform, spreadsheet or email, with filters and deadline alerts.
- 5
Decision and tracking
The team marks which tenders it will bid on, and the status of each one is recorded.
What goes into the build
Search bot (n8n or similar)
Checks the portals daily, applies the keywords and removes duplicates.
AI model
Reads tenders and produces summaries with the fields your team needs.
Opportunities platform or spreadsheet
Brings tenders, summaries, status and deadlines together for the team.
To start today, without hiring anyone
- List 10 to 20 keywords for your field, including the terms public buyers actually use.
- Create accounts on the portals that matter to you and save your searches and email alerts.
- Set a fixed time each day to review, instead of searching when you get a chance.
- Use the prompt below to summarize each tender before reading it in full.
- Log every tender you look at in a spreadsheet, with status and deadline.
A prompt to get ahead today
Prompt: triage a tender in 2 minutes
Use it right after finding a tender, to decide whether it's worth a full read.
You are a bid manager in [country]. My company: [field, size, regions, main products or services] I'll paste the tender or its main sections. Answer in bullet points: 1) Scope in 2 lines. 2) Buyer, procedure, evaluation criteria and estimated value. 3) Key dates. 4) Requirements that often cause problems. 5) A 0 to 10 fit score for my company, with reasons. Cite the tender section for each point. Don't invent dates or amounts. [PASTE THE TENDER]
What usually goes wrong
- Keywords that are too broad: too many tenders arrive and the team goes back to filtering by hand.
- Keywords that are too narrow: good tenders using different terms slip past.
- Treating the summary as a substitute for reading. Before bidding, the tender must be read carefully.
Frequently asked questions
Which portals can be monitored?
It depends on where you sell. Common sources include SAM.gov for US federal opportunities, Find a Tender and Contracts Finder in the UK, AusTender in Australia, CanadaBuys in Canada and GETS in New Zealand. State and local portals can be added depending on your market. In the free diagnostic, we look at where the tenders that matter to you are published.
Is this a real case?
Yes. mindmove.ai built a workflow where a bot sweeps Brazil's national procurement portal for each client's keywords, AI reads and summarizes every tender, and everything lands in a dedicated platform with agents that help analyze the tender and the pricing. It's used by 14 companies across 4 industries: stationery, IT, construction and food. The clients can't be named under contract.
Does it work for a small company?
Yes, and it often makes the biggest difference in small companies, where nobody is dedicated to searching for tenders. You can start with summaries arriving by email every morning and move to a platform when volume grows. Tuning the keywords in the first weeks matters most.
Can AI read long tender documents?
Yes, and it's one of the areas where it helps most: finding the scope, dates and requirements in documents dozens of pages long. The summary points to where each piece of information came from, so it's easy to check. Still, before writing the bid, a careful read of the tender stays with your team.
How soon would we start receiving tenders?
A first monitoring workflow with summaries usually runs within a few weeks. The first weeks are for calibrating keywords based on what comes in. In the free diagnostic, we already map the terms for your field and the portals that make sense.
Free diagnostic
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