Get the tenders that matter to you, sorted by AI

The problem is not a lack of tenders

SEAO publishes more than 13,000 tenders a year that end up being awarded, not counting other sources such as CanadaBuys. For a small business, the challenge is not finding tenders. It is finding too many. Between notices that look like your trade but are not, notices outside your region and notices that close in three days, someone has to sort.

Most companies sort in one of two ways. Someone browses SEAO by hand a few times a week, or the company gets a keyword alert. Both methods share the same weakness: they depend on the words the buyer chose for the title of the notice.

Why keywords miss tenders

Take a roofing contractor who sets an alert on "roofing". They will get "Roof replacement, community centre". They will miss "Building envelope work, municipal arena", even though half the contract is about the roof. They will also get "Roof inspection, building portfolio", even though they do not do inspections.

Adding keywords does not fix it: the list grows, so does the noise, and the alert ends up ignored. That is often when a company misses the tender that was meant for it.

What AI does differently

Instead of looking for exact words, AI compares the meaning of a notice with your company profile. Your profile covers what you do (your specialties, the types of tenders you target, your RBQ licence subclasses), where you work and what you do not want to receive. Every notice is read the same way: its title, its description and the type of work.

The result is a relevance level for each notice, high, medium or low, with the reason in one line: your specialty, a word in the title, your region. You see why a notice is suggested, so you can adjust your profile when needed.

The profile learns from your choices

Every morning, you mark whether a notice interests you or not. Those choices are not lost. After about a hundred of them, Discer uses them to fine-tune relevance to the way you work: if you always dismiss small maintenance contracts, they move down the list.

What a morning with Discer looks like

Around 7 a.m., an email lists the new relevant tenders, with their closing date and the estimated value when the buyer publishes it. Under each one, two buttons: "Follow this tender" or "Not for me". A followed tender goes into your pipeline; Discer then lets you know about a change of closing date and the result, and, with the Intelligence and Team plans, about every new addendum.

In the app, the tender page brings together its description and addenda. When you upload the tender documents there, AI lists the requirements of the specifications with the page where each one appears.

Setting up your profile in four steps

1. Describe your specialties in your own words. "Excavation and drainage for commercial parking lots" gives more accurate results than a list of codes.
2. Choose your priority regions. They come first in the list; other regions stay visible further down.
3. Add exclusions. If you never do snow removal, say so: those tenders disappear.
4. Sort for two weeks. Your first "Not for me" clicks are what improves sorting the most.

Want to see the result right away?

On the Discer home page, enter your Quebec enterprise number (NEQ): you get the three open tenders closest to what you have already bid on. It is the fastest way to judge whether the sorting suits you.

To go further, the Product page describes each step, from monitoring to tracking the result. Once you have found the right tenders, you still need to decide which ones are worth the effort: that is the topic of our article on what you gain from knowing your market.