What’s New in Visi, VisibleThread’s GovCon Proposal AI
Visi now asks clarifying questions before it generates a response. Send a broad prompt and instead of guessing what you meant, Visi pushes back. It asks how detailed the response should be, what format works best, who the intended audience is. Then it searches your documents and returns something actually grounded in your content.
It sounds like a small change. It isn’t.
Why this matters in GovCon
For teams relying on GovCon proposal AI, the market right now is, in Fergal McGovern’s words, “extremely confused.” Every vendor is promising AI will improve your win rate. Most people are either paralysed by the noise or quietly sceptical that any of it delivers.
That scepticism is healthy. Here is why.
Most AI tools treat every word in your documents the same. An out-of-date capability statement from three years ago gets the same weight as the proposal section you approved last week. They generate fast, they generate confidently, and they leave you to figure out whether what came back is actually accurate.
VisibleThread has always taken a different view.
You need rules in order to satisfy the need in many use cases for 100% accuracy and 100% repeatability. AI is always predictive and it's variable. If I do it today it'll be different from tomorrow.
That is the philosophy behind every product decision we make. Deterministic logic for the jobs that require absolute accuracy. Generative AI for the jobs where it genuinely adds value. And Visi Interactive is that philosophy applied directly to the prompt layer.
Rather than letting AI guess and generate something plausible, it pauses and asks. The result is output you can actually trust, not output you have to fact-check before you use it.
VisibleThread is purpose-built for government contracting proposal workflows covering tasks such as RFP analysis, compliance matrix generation, past performance drafting, and proposal section development. Unlike general-purpose AI, our products are designed to work within the accuracy and repeatability constraints that federal procurement requires.
Grounded in your content, not thin air
One of the biggest mistakes teams make when adopting AI tools is assuming the technology will figure out which content is good and which is outdated. It won’t.
VisibleThread uses collections to solve this. You curate the best content specific to a focused intent; your strongest past performance, your most current technical specs, your approved case studies. Visi searches those collections. When it asks clarifying questions first, it tightens the focus before it even begins searching. The output is grounded in the right content from the start.
What the team said
When Visi Interactive shipped internally, the reaction was immediate. Rob Stromme, one of our team members who works closely with customers, put it simply:
“I am absolutely loving this. Such a great user experience. Incredible work with this.”
Seven raised hands followed. That’s about as close to a standing ovation as you get on Slack.
How to try it
Open Visi, send a prompt that’s deliberately broad. Something you’d normally have to refine three times before you got a useful answer. Watch what happens.
If you’re not yet using VisibleThread, book a demo and we’ll show you Visi Interactive working against your own documents and content.
Frequently asked questions
What is Visi?
Visi is VisibleThread’s AI assistant, built specifically for GovCon teams. It helps you generate proposal content, summarise requirements, assess opportunities, and answer questions grounded in your own documents and past performance. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Visi is designed to work within a structured proposal lifecycle, which means the output is always tied to real content rather than generated from thin air.
Does Visi always ask clarifying questions?
Not always. If your prompt is specific enough, Visi will go straight to generating a response. The clarifying questions kick in when the prompt is broad enough that different interpretations would produce very different outputs. It’s designed to intervene when it matters, not to slow you down when it doesn’t.
Can Visi access our internal documents?
Yes. Visi works against collections, which are curated sets of your own content stored in VisibleThread. These can be drawn from SharePoint, uploaded directly, or built from past submissions and case studies. Visi only searches what you point it at, so you stay in control of what content it draws from. Nothing leaves your environment.
