70–75 marketers now draft proposals from one AI knowledge hub instead of shared Word docs and manual copy-paste.
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About 40 active users ran live projects before the wider rollout.
Adoption is expanding past the first cohort, with interest from other departments.
Costs follow pursuit volume instead of seat count, so occasional contributors don't need paid seats.
For Cushman & Wakefield, a global commercial real estate leader operating in 60 countries across the Americas, EMEA and APAC, proposals are a major part of how new business is won. Its business development teams had a well-governed content library but still built every draft by hand. With Inventive AI, the team turned that library into automated first drafts. This case study is based on conversations with Erin Courtney, Americas BD and Proposal Marketing Lead, and Ariel Kearbey, Vice President, Americas Business Development & Markets Marketing.
Cushman & Wakefield is a global commercial real estate leader operating across 60 countries in the Americas, EMEA and APAC. Its Americas Business Development and Proposal Marketing organization fields 500 to 600 complex commercial real estate pursuits each year.
The team already had an extensive, well-governed SharePoint library. It held hundreds of conflict-of-interest disclaimers, regional compliance files and global service capabilities. Getting approved answers from that library into proposals was still manual.
The team collaborated in shared Word documents until drafts reached roughly 90% completion. Proposal managers hunted down past answers, copy-pasted snippets between platforms and reconciled version conflicts across files. As volume grew, proposal content library owner Angie Timmons-Hanselka and Erin Courtney saw they needed proposal software for commercial real estate that could turn stored knowledge into automated first drafts.
"We have to go in and, literally, go into our library and copy-paste all of that stuff over. Then I just want to be able to say, okay, Inventive, here's my outline, for it to ingest that and just plug in the content. That would be the immediate low-hanging fruit of where we could gain the most time-saving."
— Erin Courtney, Americas BD and Proposal Marketing Lead, Cushman & Wakefield
When the team looked at alternatives, legacy vendors like Responsive came with a licensing problem. Cushman & Wakefield runs a distributed marketing model where dozens of contributors join pursuits occasionally, some leading only one regional pursuit a year. Paying for a full annual seat for each of them didn't make sense.
Inventive AI offered RFP software with project-based pricing, so costs follow pipeline activity instead of headcount.
"That was one of the biggest turnoffs for us of going to Responsive because of our setup. It just feels impossible to try to give that many user licenses out and not efficient for us because we may have one person who's running one project through the system a year, yet you're paying for a whole seat for them. So the project pricing model is what I would 100% prefer."
— Ariel Kearbey, VP, Americas Business Development & Markets Marketing, Cushman & Wakefield
The team also needed RFP software that worked with SharePoint. Through Inventive's integrations, and exports that kept corporate templates intact, with native headers, fonts and brand styles.
Commercial real estate bids involve complex financial portfolios and compliance rules that differ by jurisdiction, so accuracy is non-negotiable. In live trials on new corporate balance sheets and performance figures, Inventive AI answered every benchmark question accurately and matched the narrative voice.
Grounding answers in the source library also exposed problems in it. While answering questions on recent financial disclosures, the platform surfaced older data points in the library that needed updating. Regenerated answers, such as office footprints across Americas metros, matched the team's approved standard language word for word.
The Americas marketing group uses Inventive AI as RFP software for large marketing teams, across several kinds of submissions:
During the initial rollout, Cushman & Wakefield ran 50 to 60 full projects through Inventive AI. Close collaboration between the two teams let the workflow keep adapting to how the marketers actually work.
With hands-on engineering support and fast turnaround on feedback, the platform is now expanding from its first cohort of about 40 users to eight regional sub-teams. Other divisions have started asking for access too.
"It's been one of the things Erin and I have been praising you for, the partnership and your willingness to take our feedback and even adjust things. We've really enjoyed that relationship. It's truly one of the biggest things I have been saying on my end on why we would prefer to partner with you guys, especially against just other companies where I feel like we will get lost in the shuffle."
— Ariel Kearbey, VP, Americas Business Development & Markets Marketing, Cushman & Wakefield
Inventive AI helps marketing and BD teams respond to complex RFPs with accurate, cited answers from approved content.
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