4 numbers every AEC proposal leader should know in 2026

Data from the QorusDocs 10th Annual Proposal Management Survey.

AEC firms pursue fewer RFPs per month than legal or IT services teams. That sounds manageable until you factor in what each pursuit costs: 11 to 20 contributors, 6 to 10 working days, and opportunity values that regularly sit between $1M and $10M.

QorusDocs published its 10th Annual Proposal Management Survey in early 2026, covering 297 professionals across professional services, legal, IT, and AEC. The full picture is worth reading. But four numbers from the AEC data stopped us cold, and they should stop you too if you run or support a proposal function in architecture, engineering, or construction.

1. AEC firms miss 10 to 19 percent of incoming RFPs

The survey's most-selected response band across all industries, and AEC tracks with it. One in six to one in five incoming requests goes unanswered because the team cannot get to it in time.

At first glance, a 15% miss rate looks survivable. Run the arithmetic and it changes. A firm receiving 7 RFPs per month with an average opportunity value of $2M and a 50% win rate leaves roughly $10M in annual revenue unexplored, not lost, because the team never got a chance to compete.

The survey data is clear on cause. AEC firms report the most acute coordination challenges of any sector. The miss rate does not come from lazy triage. It comes from response timelines that stretch past 10 days while contributor pools reach 15, 20, sometimes 50 people across technical, commercial, and delivery functions. Each additional contributor adds scheduling friction. Scheduling friction eats calendar days. Calendar days are the scarce resource.

If your team tracks hit rate but not miss rate, you are measuring the wrong side of the pipeline.

2. AEC responses involve 11 to 20 contributors on average

The survey reports a third of AEC respondents regularly coordinate 11 to 15 people per RFP, with team sizes extending well beyond that. A quarter of AEC firms involve 16 to 20 contributors. Some report 50 or more.

This is not surprising to anyone who has assembled a shortlisting response for a major infrastructure or facilities programme. The surprise is that the bottleneck it creates still gets treated as a people problem rather than a systems problem.

Subject matter experts in AEC are billable. Their time on proposals is unbillable. Every hour a project engineer spends reviewing a draft is an hour not spent on fee-earning work. When you multiply that by 12 contributors across 7 monthly pursuits, the internal cost of proposal production becomes material, and largely invisible to leadership unless someone calculates it deliberately.

The QorusDocs data shows coordination, not writing speed, now determines how many pursuits a firm can handle. AEC firms that still treat proposals as a document-production exercise rather than a cross-functional orchestration problem are leaving capacity on the table.

3. SME delays remain the number one operational bottleneck

Across all industries, 48% of respondents named getting SMEs to deliver input on time as their top challenge. AEC firms report the most severe version of this problem, given their reliance on multi-disciplinary technical input.

The second and third ranked challenges, time spent locating and managing content (46%) and responding to requests in a timely manner (42%), are both downstream effects of the same issue. When technical contributors are late, the proposal manager has two options: wait and compress the remaining timeline, or draft without the right input and risk inaccuracy.

Neither option improves win rates.

What the data suggests is that most AEC firms have not built the operating infrastructure to manage SME participation at scale. Go/no-go processes exist, but enforcement is inconsistent. Content libraries exist, but they are fragmented across SharePoint folders and individual hard drives. Review workflows exist on paper, but they run on email.

The firms that report lower stress levels and shorter cycle times are not the ones with fewer RFPs. They are the ones that have formalized how contributors are briefed, when they are expected to respond, and what a usable input actually looks like.

4. AI improves speed and throughput but has not yet moved AEC win rates

AEC firms report some of the strongest efficiency benefits of any sector. Drafting speed, staff time allocation, throughput, and personalization all improved with AI adoption. The data on this is unambiguous.

But when it comes to win rates and revenue? The connection is weaker. Across the survey, only 35% of respondents linked AI to higher win rates or greater revenue. Among AEC respondents specifically, the dominant story is operational relief rather than competitive differentiation.

This gap matters because AEC win rates for new business are already constrained. The survey shows 71% of AEC firms reporting new-client win rates in the 25 to 49% range, and just 21% winning above 50%. AI is helping teams produce more drafts faster. It is not yet helping them produce better-positioned, more evaluator-aligned, or more differentiated responses.

The reason is structural. Most AI adoption in proposals sits at the task level: research summaries, first drafts, copy blocks. Fewer teams have connected AI to the upstream decisions that actually determine competitiveness, such as which pursuits to prioritize, how to position against specific competitors, or how to structure a value case that connects the firm's capability to the evaluator's scoring criteria.

AEC firms that treat AI as a speed upgrade will plateau. Firms that connect AI to pursuit strategy, SME coordination, and evaluator alignment will separate.

What to do with these numbers

If you lead or support an AEC proposal function, four questions follow directly from this data.

First, do you know your miss rate? Not your win rate. Your miss rate. The percentage of qualified opportunities your firm did not respond to because the team could not get organized in time. If nobody tracks it, start.

Second, have you quantified the internal cost of proposal production? Not the software. The people. When 15 billable professionals spend 10 days on a pursuit, the firm is making an investment. Knowing the size of that investment changes how leadership thinks about resourcing, tooling, and process.

Third, is your SME engagement model designed or improvised? Designed means named owners, defined input formats, enforced deadlines, and content that SMEs correct rather than create from scratch. Improvised means email chains, ad hoc requests, and hope.

Fourth, are you using AI to go faster or to compete differently? The first yields diminishing returns. The second compounds.

The full AEC breakdown from the QorusDocs survey is covered in depth in our companion article: How AEC firms manage RFP volume: insights from QorusDocs' 10th Annual Proposal Management Survey.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of RFPs do AEC firms miss due to capacity constraints?

Most AEC organizations report being unable to respond to 10 to 19% of incoming RFPs. With typical opportunity values between $1M and $10M, each missed response represents material revenue exposure.

How many people are involved in a typical AEC proposal response?

A third of AEC respondents involve 11 to 15 contributors, with many firms reporting 16 to 20 or more. Large contributor pools increase coordination overhead and compress available response time.

What is the biggest bottleneck in AEC proposal processes?

SME delays rank as the top challenge, cited by 48% of all respondents and particularly acute in AEC due to reliance on multi-disciplinary technical input across engineering, design, and project management functions.

Has AI improved AEC proposal win rates?

AI has delivered measurable efficiency gains in AEC, including faster drafting and better staff utilization. Win rate improvement, reported by 35% of respondents across all sectors, remains a secondary benefit as most AI adoption is still focused on task-level speed rather than strategic differentiation.