Behind the Roadmap: A Candid Look at Where VisibleThread Is Headed

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us. My name is Alison Ritz and I am the Director of Product Marketing at VisibleThread. If you haven’t joined Office Hours before, welcome. If you have, welcome back. Today we are going to talk about the roadmap: where the platform is headed and what that looks like in the near term. Everything we cover focuses on the rest of 2026 and what you will see in the next few releases of the VisibleThread platform. This is our regular 30 minute slot, with time for Q&A in the final few minutes. Any questions we don’t get to, put them in the Q&A box and I will make sure you get a response. Anything that needs expanding on, connect with me on LinkedIn or we will reach out afterwards. We will also share the slides and the recording after the session. If you are not yet subscribed to Office Hours, you are missing out. We meet every other Thursday to cover VisibleThread specific topics as well as broader industry themes. Our next session looks at usage and adoption, and what real value from an AI platform actually looks like. After that is Writing to Win, on how we set writers up for success, which will include a preview of the Word add-in. We will also cover getting real value from Review Gate, including our task assignment and workflow management features. We always try to close with a short five minute VisibleThread preview or product feature, but the content itself is fairly neutral and the feedback on the takeaways has been strong. How Items Get on the Roadmap I want to have a frank conversation about how we are developing the product, what the roadmap looks like, how we make these decisions, and how you can be part of it. Everything comes back to one question: does this help teams win more work with less friction? Does it help you win? Does it help you put out better proposals and optimise your process at the same time? Every candidate item, whether it comes from customer calls, support tickets or our internal team, gets tested against that. It sounds simple, but it kills a lot of ideas. Clever features and slick visuals that don’t tighten a proposal or remove a handoff did not make the cut for this half of the year. So today I want to show you what that looks like in practice. This is the plan our development team is working from. These are the actual features we are focused on, not a marketing abstraction of them. I will also be clear about what is not coming, what the timelines look like, and what the overall goal is for each theme. One note on sequencing: we are talking in releases and themes rather than specific dates for individual features. That is deliberate. It lets us deliver new capability at pace without compromising quality. The Six Development Themes These are the six themes shaping the product for the rest of the year. This is the whole plan on one slide. Behind those six themes sit roughly 150 scheduled items across the four remaining releases, and every one of them ties back to a theme. The themes are not equal in size. Usability is the biggest bucket by raw item count, which surprises people. Reporting and Visibility is the smallest, at only six items, and it lands almost entirely in the first release. The relative sizes tell you something real about where the engineering effort is going. 1. Team Workflow and Collaboration Historically, VisibleThread has been strongest at analysis: the individual power tools like shreds, compare and the acronym report. But when you look at how teams actually run a pursuit, a lot of the coordination is happening outside the platform. Section assignments in a spreadsheet. Status tracking in another product, or another spreadsheet. Review gates enforced in different ways by different teams. This theme closes that gap. What ships: Stage transitions with quality gates. A proposal cannot move forward until defined checks are complete. Kanban and timeline views, so everyone is working from the same picture. Assignments at task level and proposal section level. Threaded comments with mentions, driving in-product notifications. In short, you will be able to review inside the platform, assign tasks, collaborate on work, comment and mention colleagues, see timelines, see what is waiting on you, and manage gate and submission deadlines properly. This collaboration core lands in our first release. If you use the platform today, the current pattern is export-led. You create a shred, export it, run a compare, export it, then work from a spreadsheet or move it somewhere else. This gives you the review capability and, more importantly, the visibility inside the platform for everyone in a workspace. 2. Insights and Analysis This is the engine room. Everything else on the roadmap assumes the analysis underneath is fast and correct, so a significant part of the plan is invested here. High fidelity viewers in compare. Look at two versions or amendments side by side, assess the source document itself, and run reviews right in the platform. A revised compliance matrix. We rebuilt the approach rather than patching it. Customer feedback told us the old one did not match how compliance is actually tracked. Same foundation, same dictionaries, same reliability, accuracy and repeatability, but with far more customisation. Many of you have been building your own macros and structures. You will now be able to build those structures inside VisibleThread instead of running the analysis, exporting, and working in Excel. A federal compliance matrix that ties to your outline and your written content, and helps work through cross referencing of content and compliance. A new contracts module. Contracts is evolving meaningfully. You keep shredding, dictionaries and compare, and we are adding redlining views plus writing and editing capability. If your organisation currently pushes contracts through the proposal workflow as a workaround, you won’t need to. Contracts gets its own module and its own assessment path. Multi-doc view and multi-doc shred. Those of you on 7.0 know this isn’t there yet. It arrives in the versions shipping through the end of the year. OCR for image based documents. Previously you would have had to run an OCR conversion outside the platform to make a document readable. Now VisibleThread can read scanned images and pull text and requirements from images, text and diagrams. Visi everywhere. Visi is our Gen AI assistant. Today you interact with her in Creator mode when you are writing content, and in Research mode when you are analysing documents or building outlines. Visi everywhere lets you query documents from any part of the platform: ask questions, search for specific items, run different types of analysis. That last point speaks to our wider approach to analysis. First, apply the technology where it is genuinely appropriate. Second, layer the technologies so they work together. We have the foundational deterministic analysis, the heart of VisibleThread that you have come to trust, and we layer Gen AI capability on top of it. You start from a data grounded place, then expand and analyse from there. The outcome we want is less time reconciling documents by hand, with the same first class treatment of the underlying analysis. 3. Reporting and Visibility This is the smallest theme, and that is intentional. We are not building a set of configurable engines nobody asked for. We are focusing on the views and metrics that matter. That means dashboards for BD, capture, proposals and contracts. Not just what is in progress, but what your outstanding responsibilities are, how long items are sitting in each stage, where your slowdowns are, and where the bottlenecks in your process sit. So alongside quality metrics and workflow statistics for day to day work, you can use these dashboards to analyse your process itself. The system isn’t just bolted onto the workflow you already have. It helps you design workflows and processes for the technology that exists today, and keep optimising with data. Specifically: BD, capture and proposal dashboards, additional analysis dashboards, workspace usage stats, and user activity, so you can see how your people are actually using the platform. This also makes the ROI conversation with leadership far easier, and shows you where the remaining optimisation opportunities are. 4. Market Intelligence You cannot win the opportunity you never saw. And when you are running several sourcing platforms to cover the ground you need, your process is slower, less efficient, and exposed to gaps and duplication. So we are widening the top of the funnel inside VisibleThread: deeper US federal coverage, state and local coverage, and serious international sources. We have customers in Canada, the UK and Australia, and plenty of US federal contractors doing international work or running international divisions. Sourcing needs to be meaningful beyond US federal. In practice that means richer US federal coverage across GovWin, HigherGov, Grants.gov, SBIR, SeaPort and task order portals, plus SLED coverage, CanadaBuys, multiple UK portals and Australian portals. The UK portals are already live and AusTender is in trial. 5. Integrations We don’t want you living in another tab, another system, doing redundant work in two platforms that cannot talk to each other. There are five main items here, sequenced on purpose. The first piece of the puzzle is the API and MCP server, so you or your engineering team don’t have to wait on a specific connector and can build your own connections. Then, across the second half of the year: Salesforce, a Google Docs add-in, MS Dynamics and Box. The Word add-in sits in another section, since anyone who has used VT Writer has seen it before, but it ships in 7.3, the next release, in August. I have seen the build and it looks great. The goal is that your BD team has visibility into what is flowing into the system, that these systems talk to each other, and that your writers get their checks inside the tools they are already working in. 6. Usability and Enhancements This is the biggest theme, and the biggest theme is a long list of small things. The question is how we keep raising the usability of what we already have, release by release, through 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 and beyond, so the platform genuinely supports your workflow and meets you where you are. Reusable templates. People have asked about these for a long time. Reusable, customisable templates for writing and outlines, connected to what you already have in SharePoint and Microsoft, so you are not reinventing the wheel every time. Custom properties on opportunities, proposals and contracts. Custom fields and custom structures, so the platform shapes around your opportunities instead of forcing workarounds and half processes. Quick search across list views. Smarter compares, including more than two documents at a time, another long standing request. Better exports, carrying through the analysis you have actually done: structures, reviews, notes, assignments, colourisations. Pull it out and reuse it without duplicating work. Multiple watchword and ignore lists. Cleaner pages. None of these are big, flashy demo features. They are the parts of the platform you live in every day. This is not throwing features at the wall to see what sticks. These are decisions based on customer feedback and on our long experience with bid, proposal, BD and contracts professionals. It is not a retrain, not an overhaul, not new modules for the sake of it. It is continued improvement to the features that already work for you. The Foundation: Deterministic Plus Gen AI I said at the start that this is not a change to the foundation of VisibleThread. The foundation you trust is still there, and the deterministic part of the platform remains a major part of our development. If you follow where AI is used most effectively in the proposal process, and you have tested it yourself, you will have landed on the same conclusion we have: a combined approach gives the highest quality result. Our system is built with that in mind. A wrong answer is wrong, full stop. There is very little grey area in this business, and we want to give you tools that are accurate as well as faster. So we ground things in the deterministic layer where it matters: readability scoring, dictionaries, watchwords, compliance checks. With Visi everywhere you can layer Gen AI on top of that to analyse your responses, your coverage and your approach, but the foundation is repeatable. Whoever looks at it gets the same answer, and it is auditable and defensible. On top of that sits the speed and creativity layer: Visi everywhere, proposal outline generation, cross referencing, and handling of fuzzy scans and image based documents. All of it grounded in your documents, not the model’s imagination. You are connecting to SharePoint, structuring collections, and getting traceability and referenceability, so it works within the constraints the GovCon space demands. Traceability is the biggest piece of this puzzle. As these features release and we showcase them in this series, you will see the theme come back again and again. Everything is traceable by default. Even when the platform generates content, findings link back to exact source text. When it creates an outline, you can trace the requirements behind each section. If I am looking at section 3.2.3, my past performance approach, I can see the five requirements in the document that produced that section. If the platform tells me a technical response is 65% compliant, I can click through into the source documentation and see where that came from. Accurate where accuracy matters. Compliance, watchword hits, readability scoring, risk clause identification: all built on a deterministic foundation, so it is accurate where it needs to be and verifiable by you. Built for how you review. Built to support colour team reviews, audits, negotiations and assessment management. Your scoring follows you through the process, whatever your structure looks like today. In review, every claim carries a citation. In compliance, the same input gives the same score every time. In a contract negotiation, every obligation traces back to a clause. Release Schedule We are planning three to four releases for the rest of the year, with four as the goal: 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. The bulk of what you have seen today sits in 7.3 and 7.4, because the nearer releases are more fully scoped. The later releases will fill out based on feature improvements, customer feedback and usage data. 7.3 (August) is the next release. It carries the core workflow and usability themes: core workflow, dashboards, compliance and shred expansion, the compliance matrix work, Visi everywhere, and the API and MCP server. 7.4 (September to October), roughly six to seven weeks later, brings the full contracts module build out, multi-document analysis, additional file formats and OCR, Slack and Teams integration, and the Salesforce integration. So when I talk about these integrations, modules and enhancements, I am not talking about six months or a year away. By the end of the government fiscal year, you will see these in the platform. Through the rest of the year, we fill out the top of funnel additions, MS Dynamics, the Excel add-in, international portals and the Box integration. Your Input Shapes the Next Half Your input is a big part of deciding what comes next. This isn’t a suggestion box, it is a way to feed in what you are experiencing in your own workflow. Our ask: tell your CSM the workflow, not the feature. Where are you losing time? Where are the real pain points in your process? As you get access to new capability in VisibleThread, where are you still seeing slowdowns? Our early access programme is running proofs of concept now on Visi everywhere, MCP and outline generation, and early users will help shape them as they develop. And the dashboards cut both ways. We see usage too, so between what gets used and what you tell us, we can genuinely prioritise the next half and start shaping 2027. Key Takeaways Six themes, one filter. Does this improve your workflow and your process? That is what everything is judged against, so that you win more and work with less friction. The workflow becomes shared. Gates, views, tasks and comments. We are moving the pursuit inside the platform and building out the project and proposal management side of it. Gen AI accelerates drafting. The deterministic layer grounds your decisions. Traceability is the theme of the VisibleThread platform, now and always. Four releases planned, with the first two heavily loaded, and international integrations closing out the year. The future is still being written. Your feedback genuinely feeds the platform. Q&A Will the slides be available after the presentation? Yes. Everyone who attended and everyone who registered will get the slides and the recording. Is the platform suited to non-federal and non-US tenders? Yes. I touched on this with the sourcing portals. Our earlier opportunity sourcing portals were geared to US federal customers, but across the rest of the platform you decide what your pipeline and your structure look like. If that is a traditional Shipley process, fine, and your gate review process is entirely up to you. You can select a non-US government opportunity in the platform, and you can customise the inputs and data fields. That customisation will keep developing. The data fields are not locked to the structure of a US federal opportunity, and the analysis is not either. That matters even for federal work, because not every RFP is a standard CLIN-structured US federal opportunity. It varies by agency. So requirement extraction does not depend on a specific document structure, and the system works across federal, SLED, commercial and international documents. Dictionaries, watchwords, shreds and compares are not tied to document structure at all. Many of our US federal customers also operate internationally, so there is real application beyond US federal. Happy to continue that conversation and walk you through specific examples. Thank you all for staying a few minutes over. If any of the upcoming topics sounded useful, register for the series or connect with me on LinkedIn. I wanted to give you a candid overview of what the rest of the year looks like, what our six themes are, and how we are structuring the work. We want to meet you where you are and build on the platform we already have. We have had long and fruitful relationships with our customers, we have been in this space for over 15 years, and the goal is to build on the foundation you trust, enhance the platform in ways that genuinely support your workflow, and keep partnering with you for years to come. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.