How is this different from an AI chat assistant?

A chat assistant answers questions you bring to it. The Pursuit Strategist works from your pipeline and produces work — research, structured pipeline updates, and drafts attached to specific pursuits — without being asked each time.

What can it do without us, and what can it not?

It can research, organize, identify, recommend, and draft. It cannot submit anything, contact a partner, make a bid decision, or advance a pursuit through a gate. Those stay with your team, and the agent stages its work for review rather than acting.

How do we check the research and drafts it produces?

Every finding cites its source — the solicitation, public award records, your company profile, the gate tracker, or the pursuit record. Corrections are recorded against the pursuit alongside the original finding, so how a decision was reached stays visible.

MERIT Pursuit Strategist

A business development agent that moves pursuits forward.

The Pursuit Strategist does business-development work—not just summaries. It brings opportunity discovery, incumbent research, pipeline building, capture organization, and document drafting into one pursuit workflow — and hands each piece back with its sources and the decision it needs from your team.

What changes

Capture work gets done between reviews, not only during them.
Research and drafts arrive with citations your team can check.
Every piece of work ends at a decision, and the decision stays yours.

Five kinds of work, carried across every active pursuit.

Discover opportunities: Reads new federal solicitations against your company profile and qualifies the ones that fit, with the reasoning attached.
Research incumbents: Compiles incumbent history, award records, and recompete timing so the competitive picture is on the pursuit before the review.
Build the pipeline: Stages pursuits, keeps owners and dates current, and flags the ones that have stopped moving.
Prepare pursuit documents: Drafts capture and pursuit documents for review, citing the solicitation and your own records rather than inventing content.
Surface the next decision: Ends each piece of work at a specific, owned decision — what to pursue, who to team with, what to close.

More than a daily summary.

A reporting layer tells you the state of your pipeline. An agent changes it. The Pursuit Strategist works inside the pursuit rather than above it — the output is research, structured updates, and drafts attached to specific opportunities, waiting where the pursuit lives.

It is also not a chat window. You do not have to know what to ask. The work arrives already done, cited to the solicitation, the award record, or your own company records, so a review is a matter of confirming or correcting rather than taking anything on trust.

Built around how GovCon BD actually works.

The agent works to a capture process rather than a generic task list. It knows a pursuit has to clear fit before customer, and customer before coverage; that a labor category with no named candidate is a bid risk; that an incumbent with a long award history changes the competitive read; and that a teaming gap found during capture is cheap while the same gap found during writing is not.

That structure is what makes the output usable. A draft arrives in the shape your capture process expects, and a flag arrives at the gate where someone can still act on it.

Gate-aware: Work is organized around the gates a pursuit has to clear, in order.
Evidence-led: Fit, coverage, and competitiveness are argued from records, not asserted.
Timed to be useful: Risks surface at the point in the pursuit where they can still be closed.

Work continues. Decisions stay with your team.

The agent keeps working while the team is elsewhere — overnight, across a long proposal week, through the days when BD loses to delivery. In the morning it presents what changed, what it prepared, and what now needs a person.

The boundary is firm and deliberate. It does not submit, contact partners, make bid decisions, or advance a pursuit on its own. Approvals, overrides, and corrections are recorded against the pursuit, so how a decision was reached stays visible later.

Nothing advances alone: Gates, teaming, and submissions all wait for an explicit human action.
Corrections are kept: An override is recorded next to the original finding, not silently replaced.

What the team wakes up to.

Not a second list of capabilities — a record of what changed while the office was empty, and what the agent did about each one.

Amendment posted: Re-read overnight, and the affected gate fields updated with citations Source: SAM.gov
Gate item closed: Pursuit restaged, with the next owner's action queued for approval Source: Gate tracker
Coverage gap opened: A labor category lost its named candidate; teaming options drafted Source: Staffing records
Deadline moved: Priorities reordered across active pursuits, with the change flagged Source: Solicitation

Questions teams ask

How is this different from an AI chat assistant?: A chat assistant answers questions you bring to it. The Pursuit Strategist works from your pipeline and produces work — research, structured pipeline updates, and drafts attached to specific pursuits — without being asked each time.
What can it do without us, and what can it not?: It can research, organize, identify, recommend, and draft. It cannot submit anything, contact a partner, make a bid decision, or advance a pursuit through a gate. Those stay with your team, and the agent stages its work for review rather than acting.
How do we check the research and drafts it produces?: Every finding cites its source — the solicitation, public award records, your company profile, the gate tracker, or the pursuit record. Corrections are recorded against the pursuit alongside the original finding, so how a decision was reached stays visible.