What if an AI Agent were the new typewriter for public tenders?

On Thursday 15 October, in Bari, as part of the 1st FARE National Conference, a seminar was held with a title we liked right away: "What if an AI Agent were the new typewriter for public tenders?"

It was organised by TenderBrain, the company (separate, but part of the family) that created a vertical version of AIDeskPro designed for public tenders. The room was fuller than anyone expected: once the seminar had started, more chairs had to be brought in. A sign that the topic really matters to everyone, to those who issue tenders and to those who take part in them.

Our own Luca Visconti, CEO of Open Gate, spoke as CTO of TenderBrain to explain, without too much jargon, what agents really are. Below you will find the full video of the seminar.

The chat answers, the agent works

Luca started from a sentence we absolutely love: the chat answers, the agent works.

A chat gives you an answer and stops there. An agent instead plans, chooses a tool, looks at the result and tries again. If you ask a chat to analyse a thousand documents, it will practically never do it. An agent looks at all thousand, with infinite patience, one after the other. It is the kind of work that weighs on a human being, and does not weigh on the agent at all.

Like the typewriter

The comparison in the title is no accident. The typewriter changed bureaucracy: it made documents uniform, readable and comparable, and allowed people who previously could not to do a certain job. Artificial intelligence, and agents in particular, take an even bigger step: they make everything faster and easier and leave people time to inspire, correct and do better.

AI is not competence: it is a competence multiplier

This was the passage that made the room smile the most. Luca put it this way: if the person using AI has no competence, multiplying 0 by 0 leaves 0. If instead they have 100 of competence, it multiplies them by 100 and gives 10,000.

Those who have trained hard in recent years, in other words, are exactly the ones who get the most out of it today: they manage to do in days what used to take weeks or months.

Knowing where every piece of information comes from

One thing TenderBrain cares a lot about is traceability. For every piece of information the agent lets the operator understand where it comes from, and how and why it was used: whether it is something the model knew, something the user said, or something that comes from a document, in which case which document and which paragraph.

In the texts it produces, the points to check also stand out: for example, an improvement proposal is highlighted in blue, because a person must approve it, while a missing piece of data (such as the right CV for the project manager) is highlighted in red.

And decisions? They stay with us

On this, all the speakers were clear. The agent prepares, but does not decide: it does not give scores and does not sit at the evaluation committee table. It checks, flags, brings the paragraph, and then it is up to the person to judge. As Luca recalled, quoting Floridi, AI has the ability to act but not intelligence and understanding: we have those, we who use the tool.

You will find the idea familiar: it is the same one you find in the line at the bottom of this site, and that we tell in this post. The agent executes, a person decides.

Thank you!

A heartfelt thank you to those who made this seminar possible and made it so good:

• Gianluca Viganò, President of ALE, who moderated and opened the proceedings with the contracting authority's point of view;
• Amanda De Cosmo, of Studio Brugnoletti&Associati, who guided us through the legal deep dive;
• Federico De Rovere, CEO of Corios, who brought the voice of SMEs and economic operators;
• Andrea Lucotti, who made all of this possible.

Thanks also to FARE for hosting us at such a well-attended conference, and to everyone who filled the room (and the extra chairs).

Want to know more? You will find the full recap of the seminar on the TenderBrain website. And if you work with public tenders and want to see agents at work on yours, write to us at sales@opengate.biz.