Benesch’s AI Evolution: Smarter Search, Faster Content and Greater Efficiency

About Benesch

Benesch is a premier, national engineering firm with expertise in transportation infrastructure and community development. Since its founding in 1946, Benesch has been driven by one goal—improving communities large and small.

Summary

Facing information silos across the breadth of a large organization, Benesch implemented Kantiv to enable marketing content search and discovery while streamlining their proposal management process through generative AI technologies. The platform is now being used by the company's 34-person marketing team and nearly 400 technical staff, increasing collaboration and maximizing efficiency for everyone who touches pursuit marketing. By using Kantiv, Benesch has been able to triple productivity in certain use cases.

The Challenge

With more than 1,000 employees across 22 states, Benesch possesses extensive infrastructure expertise. While Benesch's marketing team was satisfied with the structure of their proposal process and the quality of their outputs, accessing specialized knowledge across the company's divisions remained challenging.

"Our proposal process is well-structured, but we didn't always have the right institutional knowledge at our fingertips," notes Chad Bay, Marketing Communications Manager at Benesch. "For example, say there's someone in the North region who has developed multiple proposals about Benesch's emergency response capabilities; if someone on the West Region team needs that information, they have to dig through old files or interrupt that person's work to find it."

Bay recognized the potential of modern AI-powered proposal management tools to streamline content discovery and generation.

"We really wanted a tool that could do two distinct things. We wanted an easy, user-friendly way to search for quality content from our own proposal archives, and we wanted the latest generative text capabilities to help us draft new content faster."

The Solution

While evaluating various tools, Benesch struggled to find an AI solution aligned with their specific needs. "Many platforms we reviewed were either not AEC-specific or their AI capabilities weren't developed enough," Bay recalls.

The breakthrough came when Bay attended a Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) luncheon where Rohan Jawali, Kantiv's Co-founder and CEO, was presenting. "I immediately saw the potential. Unlike other tools, Kantiv wasn't just a glorified file directory—it actually understood our industry and could generate content from our existing proposals."

After implementation, Kantiv's search capabilities perfectly addressed Benesch's primary challenge of locating the right content quickly: "We now have almost 1,000 proposals in Kantiv. I can search for any term, and within seconds, I have every relevant reference broken down by documents, people, and projects. It's a huge time saver."

The Result

In achieving the goals of content searchability and generation, Benesch unlocked process improvements that have had a demonstrable impact on Benesch's marketing function.

• Expedited Deliverable Production - "Kantiv is helping our teams deliver higher quality work much faster. Our first drafts can be checked for compliance against the requirements of the RFP, and we have access to a massive library of content to help us flesh out marketing messages and technical content right at go. That's huge. It's a game changer."
• Expanding Use Cases - "Our marketing teams are using Kantiv for more than just proposals—we draft team bios, marketing collateral, and case studies for a variety of uses. It's saving us time and elevating our content across the board."
• Excitement and Efficiency - "One engineer, who'd never used AI before, was pulled into a proposal last minute to write a technical approach. He called me out of the blue to say he finished in two hours what would typically take him 6 to 8. It turned what could have been a chore into an exploration of a new tool. He was excited."

"Kantiv is helping us work faster and ensure our proposals reflect the best of what we do. It's quickly becoming a key part of our proposal development strategy." - Chad Bay