The week before last, the VisibleThread team hosted our quarterly customer forum in Arlington, VA. These events are a great way to connect with customers. They allow attendees to network with peers, learn from industry experts, and discover new ways to use VisibleThread products.
The forum on July 23, 2025, had a packed agenda covering critical industry topics. The day was broken down into four key sessions:
- How to Successfully Adopt AI by Allison Ritz
- A customer case study from KBR on Acronym Extraction
- A review of the VisibleThread Roadmap and product vision by our Founder, Fergal McGovern
- A bonus session on Tech Adoption & ROI Strategies from BTW & Co
Here’s a summary of the insights from each session.
How to Successfully Adopt AI
This session tackled the hurdles and strategies for implementing AI. The discussion acknowledged universal challenges like team bandwidth constraints, organizational hurdles, implementation challenges, data hygiene issues, and security considerations.
Key takeaways for successful AI adoption included:
- Presale Considerations: It’s crucial to clearly identify your organization’s pain points and how AI can solve them. Check your current processes and data to find any gaps before adding automation.
- Organizational/IT Considerations: Understand the internal process for deploying new software. It’s vital to connect with IT professionals early and often. Be prepared for additional approvals or reviews that may be required due to the AI component.
- Training and Rollout: A successful implementation requires a phased approach, including preparation, configuration, training, deployment, and ongoing monitoring. When users embrace any new technology, it is crucial they understand the benefits and the “what’s in it for me?”
Customer Case Study: KBR on Acronym Extraction
Sara Sjolander, a Senior Proposal Specialist with KBR, shared a detailed look at how her team uses VisibleThread. They use it to manage a critical and often tedious part of proposal development.
- The Challenge: In government contracting, proposals are filled with acronyms. Manually tracking terms to ensure they are defined on first use and used correctly is a tedious task. This process could take a team hours or even days on large, multi-volume proposals.
- The Solution: For the past six years, KBR has used VisibleThread to automate this process. Now, managing acronyms for a document can be done in under an hour. Sara specifically highlighted the “export to annotated Word document” feature as a game-changer that has made the process faster.
- Sara’s Tips: Sara shared several tips, including:
- Keeping up with acronyms throughout the writing process rather than waiting until the end
- Running the acronym report a second time after clean-up to catch any errors and generate a clean list
- And considering not using an acronym at all if it only appears once in the document.
VisibleThread Roadmap: The Next Generation of RFP Lifecycle Management
VisibleThread Founder, Fergal McGovern, presented the company’s product vision. He focused on evolving the platform to support the entire opportunity lifecycle, from inception to win.
The roadmap aims to create a next-gen RFP platform by combining VisibleThread’s accurate dictionaries with the power of Generative AI.
The goal is to enhance accuracy, traceability, and security while adding automation for greater efficiency. The enhanced platform will support BD, Capture, Proposals, and Contracts—while meeting top security standards.
For those who missed it, an upcoming webinar on September 3, 2025, will offer an exclusive look at these changes.
Bonus Session: Tech Adoption & ROI Strategies
The day concluded with a bonus session from Marcia, Theresa, and Dale at BTW & Co on Tech Adoption & ROI Strategies. This session provided attendees with practical frameworks for driving technology adoption and maximizing the return on their software investments.
