What’s New in VisibleThread 7.3

Hello, and welcome to our office hour session. If you are new and this is your first session, welcome. If you have been here before, welcome back. Today, VisibleThread is going to take center stage, and we are going to talk about the 7.3 release. There is a lot of really exciting stuff in this release, and there are a few different themes we will cover at a high level. We’ll look at ownership, task workflows, new dashboards, how we create outlines, trace requirements, and create content both in the platform and in the Word add-in, just to name a few. What I want to do is go over a few slides with you. I promise we’ll spend most of our time in the platform today, but I’m going to go through a few high-level themes of the release first, and then we’ll dive right in. If you’re new to us, welcome, and if you’re back, even better, since you wanted to join us again. We meet every other Thursday for thirty minutes and try to keep this pretty casual. We talk about a lot of different things: what’s happening in the industry, issues facing our customers, workflow, AI adoption, and, of course, some VisibleThread updates. It’s a chance to give you a snapshot of what’s happening now and what’s coming. We’re covering this release today, and we may add an additional session soon to give you more information about what’s happening at the platform right now. In two weeks, we’ll be talking about getting value from your review gates, how your reviews can really strengthen your draft. Our follow-on session after that will be about building compliance and clarity into your first draft, how we can shift some of those checks left and move them into the first draft to get to quality content more efficiently. Coming up in Q4, we have some great sessions planned. Our own Kyle Peterson will be joining me, along with a few other special guests who will talk about what’s happening in the world of GovCon and proposals. I’m really excited about those. You can register for the entire series using the link on the screen (it’s also in the console and on our website), so look out for that. Okay, housekeeping is finished, let’s jump in. Overview Today we’ll cover the pieces of this release that I think are most important: where 7.3 fits in, from single-user analysis to connected workflows across the team, and what that looks like across the board. One of the main themes of this release is collaboration and visibility: ownership, task assignment, threaded comments, and notifications, so both the individual user and the wider organization can stay aware of what’s happening in workspaces and how opportunities are progressing. Quality control tracking: we’ll talk about stage gates, dashboards, and Kanban and timeline views, again in that visibility theme, but with a broader scope. Outline to compile proposal: one of the main workflows we’ll look at today is creating an outline, assigning work, collaborating, and driving action to actually create content and compile a final proposal. I’ll also briefly touch on the fact that we launched the first version of our API and MCP server, to enhance the ways you can integrate VisibleThread into your own stack. I won’t demo that today, but I’ll mention it on a slide, and we can set up a follow-up if that’s something you’d like to cover. Collaboration, communication, and visibility Collaboration and Task Ownership Speaker 1 Diving in: the first theme is clear ownership, real tasks, and tracking that in the same place the analysis already lives. Ownership needs to be front and center, whether for opportunities, proposals, or specific actions: who owns this, and where does it stand? We’re also managing tasks directly against opportunities as well as across the workspace, so as a user I can manage my tasks across my entire space or at the opportunity level. That means we can assign very specific items or take broader strokes, depending on the work. Threaded comments let you collaborate, call out contributors, and work through issues to progress the work. And in-product notifications, which we’ll touch on shortly, are structured to show you exactly what’s changed. Up until now, a lot of VisibleThread’s value was in what a single user could do in a space, and then exporting items to share among team members. Now we’re bringing collaboration front and center, giving you the opportunity to use the platform not just for analysis and creation, but for ongoing collaboration and review. Stage gates and tracking Stage Gates and Quality Control Speaker 1 Let’s talk about stage gates when it comes to Kanban boards and opportunity management. Whether we’re talking about front-end opportunities or proposals in process, we want quality gates at every stage. When opportunities transition between stages, there are checkpoints and questions that need to be answered. That information is logged and visible to everyone on the team, showing up in dashboards and activity views, supporting the views you already use. Nothing moves and no decisions are made without the rest of the team having visibility into what’s happening, which really enhances collaboration. Outline to compile proposals The approach to outlines has improved in this release. We’ll look at how requirements are identified and grouped, and how that affects the outline. You can also use your own templates and work inside Word. If you were familiar with VT Writer, you may recognize the Word add-in concept, but now it’s available in the VT 7 platform, so you can work in the platform, in Word, or both, collaborate together, and then compile everything into your final response. This supports a multi-contributor model well. AI Traceability and Determinism Speaker 1 We also want to focus on determinism and traceability. A lot of customer feedback around AI is “I don’t trust the output” or “I don’t know the justification here.” You might get a score or an alignment result and be told these are the requirements, but how do you know it’s accurate? We want you to take advantage of generative AI for speed, structure, and analysis, while still giving you the guardrails to trace requirements back to their source and double-check accuracy. We’ll walk through that, as well as the content creation process, both grounded in data. API and MCP server I’ll touch briefly on the API and MCP server. This first version is aimed at integration, so you can pull VisibleThread analysis into the systems your team already works in, without sacrificing permissions, workspace boundaries, or your audit trail. If this is of interest to you or your team, we can set up a meeting to talk about how it fits into your tool chain. I just wanted to make sure everyone’s aware it’s available and continually being developed. Smaller improvements A few quick, incremental usability improvements: Quick search bars across all list views New alerts for SAM.gov opportunities (when a tracked opportunity changes or gets new documents) New exports and new filtering Refreshed detail pages on card-based views Updated cloud activity tracker Proposal documents exposed to interactive opportunities A stop button for Ask Vizi Overall, these are quality and experience improvements. While the big items of a release get the most attention, we’re continually taking your feedback and updating the platform to give you the best experience. Live demo Okay, I made it through my slides, and I promised we’d spend most of the time live in the platform, so let’s jump in. I won’t walk through everything, this isn’t a full demo, but I’ll touch on the highlighted areas and walk through a couple of workflows so you get a real sense of VT 7.3 in practice. Let me share my screen and we’ll get started. Homepage and activity tracking Homepage and Activity Tracking Speaker 1 This is the VisibleThread platform homepage, what you see when you log into a specific workspace. There are shortcuts to jump to different parts of the platform, and an overall view of how many opportunities I’m tracking, how many proposals are active or in various stages, contracts, and different types of analysis. I can create new proposals, move tracked opportunities, or jump to specific areas from here. I want to draw your attention to the new action and activity trackers. Jumping into “Actions by Area” gives an overall view of activity in my workspace, broken down into BD capture (writing technical alignments, doing shreds, tracking opportunities, managing Kanban boards, and so on), proposals, contracts analysis, and configurations and specifications. This gives you a good sense of what’s happening in your workspace, how work is being distributed, and where there might be opportunities for additional training, where customer success could step in, or what new use cases might be worth introducing. It gives us a real view of what we’re working with so we can enhance your experience. You can also break this down by user. It’s not a very interesting view in my own workspace since it’s just me, but in a standard customer workspace you’d see how work is split and spread across the team, with totals or detailed drill-downs, by source and by timeline. The activity view shows all activity and events within the workspace. You can search by user, type, or action to drill down: editing documents, querying Vizi, assigning ownership, uploading information, all of it is recorded here, and you can export to CSV. It’s a lot of information, but the goal is to give you the visibility you need to think about how you’re using the platform and how we can work together to improve your experience. Notifications In-Product Notifications and Mentions Speaker 1 Notifications tie in closely with activity. When you assign work, assign items, or call each other out in threaded comments, all of that shows up here, similar to notifications in other systems you’re likely familiar with. As a user: what’s been assigned to me? Have I been mentioned in any comments? If a colleague I’m working with, say Emily, creates a report or runs an analysis on a shared proposal, it’ll show up here too, so we can collaborate more effectively. I can see my assignments, comments across different reports and reviews, and updates, for example, documents pulled in from SAM, or a compare report Emily created, since I last logged in, along with due dates. If you have a lot of notifications, you can mark them all read so it’s not a chore to get through them. It’s a great way to stay on top of everything happening. If Emily mentions me in a comment, I can jump straight to that location and see the exact comment, for example, a note that we have a four-million-dollar increase on the size standard in a new amendment, and work through it efficiently from there. Stage gates and tracked opportunities BD Capture and Opportunity Dashboards Speaker 1 Now let’s move to stage gates and managing tracked opportunities, in the BD Capture section. Looking at the dashboard, we see all active opportunities in the system: pipeline value by customer, a funnel showing what stage opportunities sit in, a best-fit view showing how well dollars align with our specifications, a due-date timeline, and a breakdown by best fit, time in stage, and owner. This is a great indicator, especially as opportunities move into proposal spaces, of where there might be bottlenecks or slowdowns, and whether things are sitting in a stage longer than expected. Customers new to this kind of data often uncover bottlenecks they didn’t realize they had, and get a lot of visibility into what’s actually happening in their spaces. You can break dashboards down by time as well, and see all related activity in one place. These are the opportunities we’re actively tracking in the system. In the Kanban view, the categories (new, qualifying, pursuing, decision) are just a basic template; they’re fully customizable to your organization’s process. We try to mirror your existing stages as closely as possible, whether in BD Capture and tracked opportunities, or in proposals and process. Customizable Stage Gate Workflows Speaker 1 Stage gates: multiple people can be assigned to work on an opportunity. If I want to move an opportunity from “new” to “qualifying,” I’ll get stage gate questions. You can set these as soft gates, which let users skip the questions, or hard gates, which require them to be answered before progressing. In this example, it asks whether the opportunity is logged from SAM and whether the go/no-go screen is complete. I answer yes to both, and the opportunity can move to “qualifying.” That activity is logged, so if you go back to the activity view, you’ll see that I moved the opportunity from “new” to “qualifying” and answered both questions yes, along with the justification for the decision. Anyone, including a supervisor or opportunity owner, can see exactly what happened and why, which gives a lot of auditability. Just like the categories and stages, the stage gate questions themselves are fully customizable, so you can reflect whatever process you use today. Other views There’s also a list view showing posted dates, updated dates, and document details, including any attachments. You can assign people and even start proposals directly from this view. There’s a timeline view too, which gives a broader look at workload and helps with structure and management. Moving to proposals: if you’ve used the VisibleThread platform before, Kanban board views are new to BD Capture and tracked opportunities, but not to proposals. Again, these categories and stages are fully customizable. For example, questions here might include compliance matrix, kickoff meeting, or internal deadline for a completed first draft, and how those are logged in activity as items progress. Outline and content creation Generative AI Outline Generation Speaker 1 Now for the last major piece: the outline, creating content in the Word add-in, and compiling a response. The proposal outline in VisibleThread is generated using generative AI. I’ve already created this one in advance since it takes a few minutes to process and type requirements, but essentially you select your proposal outline, select the requirements documents from your solicitation package as the source, and let the system analyze them. It identifies the document type and structure (for example, a BAA or a combined synopsis solicitation), then identifies and types the requirements, and generates the outline. In this case, it’s telling me I have 78 sections across five levels, with headings and subheadings. The first thing I want to call out is the trace column (showing R9, R10, R1, R3, etc.). Clicking into a section, for example “Application Maintenance and Enhancement,” shows the requirements that justify that section being part of the outline. On the right is a high-fidelity viewer showing the actual solicitation document, so we’re building a traceable path from the generated outline back to the source requirements and their presentation in the source document. Clicking a requirement takes you directly to where it appears in the document, with surrounding context. You can also open this in a coverage view for another perspective. The goal is to address a common concern: with a generated outline, you often have no guided way to verify accuracy, just an outline and a manual read-through. This approach opens up that AI “black box” and gives real traceability back to the requirements, so you can justify and verify correctness, and still edit the structure, drag and drop, add, or delete items as needed. Assigning and writing content Writing Content via Word Add-in Speaker 1 Coming back to the outline, I can assign different sections to different people, for example, some sections to me and some to Emily. I can see when something has been written and moved to “in review,” along with when it was last updated and who’s assigned. Reviewers can leave comments directly, so there’s a lot of collaboration and visibility into the status of each document. To create content, I select a section assigned to me, for example, “Training User Support” under “Ad Hoc Support and Technical Assistance,” and select “Start Writing.” I have the option to work directly in the VisibleThread platform, but today we’re going to use the Word add-in. After selecting the Word add-in and clicking Next, I can choose a style template. I have a VT standard template, but you can upload your own so the draft uses your fonts, margins, and style, getting much closer to a final product from the first draft. After selecting the template, I generate the section. Once in Word, I open the VisibleThread add-in and highlight the section I want to write. I’m responding to a specific requirement, and I can ground the content either in proposal documentation or in a collection. Collections are groups of approved, up-to-date, high-quality content you want to draw from, which can be grouped by content type, pursuit type, or customer, and pulled from SharePoint, uploaded, or sourced from your own environment. I ground this section in a collection so the content is accurate and, importantly, referenceable. The system may ask a few questions, for example about audience, level of detail (I chose “moderate”), and format (I chose “prose”). It then generates content based on my answers, the prompt, and the grounded collection. Once generated, you’ll see reference bubbles, which link back to the exact spot in the reference material supporting a given claim, so you can easily fact-check yourself and make sure everything is defensible with no ambiguity. I insert that content into the document. Back in the platform Content Readability and Scoring Speaker 1 Coming back to the VisibleThread platform, the “Training and User Support” document I just created in the add-in now appears here too, along with readability information (whether created in the Word add-in or the platform): long sentences, passive voice, readability grade level, watchword hits, and more, all editable directly in the system or in the add-in. Back in the outline, sections with content show linked documents, which you can open to do further work. Once everything for a section is complete, you can mark it as such. Combining into a final document Final Document Compilation Workflow Speaker 1 When ready, you can combine everything into one working document with a single click. In this example, it shows four documents and 78 sections (in practice this could be many more documents). You can generate the combined document either in the VisibleThread platform or directly in Word, then begin editing and scoring the content. In the generated working document, sections I haven’t written yet show just headings and notes, while sections I’ve written to include the full content and materials. This is the next step in going from a multi-contributor response to a combined, editable draft, whether you continue in the platform or in the Word add-in. Closing I’ll stop there for today. I know we covered a lot. If you have any questions, we’d love to continue the conversation, and if there’s anything you’d like more information on, or anything I didn’t cover while jumping around the platform, please reach out. You’ll also get some follow-up information from us, as always. Future Release Roadmap Speaker 1 Keep in mind we’re on an aggressive release schedule for the rest of the year, with both upgrades and usability enhancements as well as major releases. In Q4, you’ll see two releases that include, among other things: enhancements to the compliance matrix with customizable columns, enhanced contracts functionality including analysis and redlining, additional collaboration features, a new module we haven’t shown before, expansion of our generative AI analysis capabilities with Vizi Everywhere, more integrations with sales support platforms like Salesforce and Dynamics, and several new sources for opportunity sourcing. There’s a lot of exciting work coming. We’ll keep bringing you that information here and across other channels. Thank you so much for joining today. Please reach out, connect with me on LinkedIn, and register for the series if you’re interested in hearing more and joining us on Thursdays. Thanks again, and have a wonderful day!