A decade ago a public-sector RFP for a mid-sized institutional project ran 40 to 80 pages. Today, the same procurement comes in at 150 to 250, and we regularly see school board, hospital, and municipal packages cross 400. Addenda, evaluation matrices, appendices, sub-consultant forms, sustainability and DEI questionnaires — each one adds weight, and almost none of it gets shorter the following year.
Procurement teams add language; they almost never remove it. Every audit finding, every legal challenge, every project that went sideways gets translated into a new clause for the next RFP. Public-sector compliance frameworks compound. Sustainability requirements that didn't exist five years ago now occupy 20-page appendices. Indigenous consultation, accessibility, supply-chain provenance — all of these are new sections that are now standard.
Here's what nobody talks about: most teams (and most AI tools) handling these RFPs silently truncate. A 300-page document gets fed into a tool with a fixed context window, the tail is dropped, and the user gets a confident-looking checklist that quietly omits the last forty pages — which is exactly where submission forms, scoring rubrics, and declarations tend to live.
The result isn't dramatic. It's a missed mandatory form, an unchecked compliance box, a scoring penalty. The kind of thing that loses you the proposal without you ever knowing why.
For very large RFPs, two things have to be true. First, the tool should let you decide what's worth extracting before it spends time on everything — because some sections (Evaluation Criteria, Submission Requirements, Forms & Declarations) are disproportionately critical and worth focused attention. Second, when you do extract everything, the document has to be processed in full — chunked if necessary, but never silently dropped.
This week we added two things to address exactly this. A new requirement category pre-scan runs in seconds and shows you a table of contents of what's actually in the RFP — so you can target your extraction at Submission Requirements and Evaluation Criteria before committing to a full pass. And a new chunked extraction path for very large documents handles RFPs up to roughly 700 pages without dropping the tail. If a section gets skipped, you see it.
If your firm regularly responds to large public-sector RFPs and you'd like to see how this works on a real document, book a 15-minute demo.