Building a winning proposal requires more than just answering a list of RFP requirements: It requires creating a story of how your firm and its body of work align with the project and client you’re bidding for. You must understand the big picture first, and then find all the little details that help you tell that story.
When proposals fall apart, it often happens when context and knowledge are lost in the gaps between stages: an RFP detail missed in planning, a strong past project nobody thought to pull into drafting, a requirement left unchecked right before submission.
That’s why we’ve redesigned Shred to close those gaps and support you across the entire proposal process. As the biggest Shred update since its release, Shred 3.0 has introduced several features, including a rebuilt core experience, smarter AI throughout the pursuit, deeper final review requirement checking, and language support that helps you build better proposals from planning, drafting, to final closeout.
Here’s a look at what’s new at every stage.
Planning: Read everything, understand everything
When a new pursuit begins, it starts with a pile of documents you need to make sense of. Shred 3.0 helps you parse through those files more easily.
New pursuit workspace with multi-file support and improved insights
Shred now reads the entire pursuit package as one connected set — scope of work, evaluation criteria, contextual documents, and addenda — rather than a single file with a few attachments bolted on.
It sorts every document into the right category on its own, so nothing gets missed before drafting starts, and it builds a proposal management plan and response outline that mirrors how pursuits are actually structured: volumes, sections, sub-questions included.
A new insights feature also automatically connects the dots across your documents. It can flag a certification the client called out by name, or catch a deadline buried in an addendum. When an addendum arrives, Shred 3.0 finds what changed and updates your plan, so your team only has to look at what needs action.
AI-recommended projects
Shred compares your RFP's scope of work against your OpenAsset DAM project library and suggests the best-matching past projects. Instead of relying on your team’s memory and a best guess, you now have a data-backed selection of relevant projects to choose from.
When combined with Shred’s existing integrations with Deltek and Unanet, this reinforces Shred’s use as an easy-to-manage, single source of truth.
AI-powered entity metadata & tagging
RFPs and proposal library content now get tagged automatically, using your firm's own language and taxonomy standards instead of a generic tag set. This makes finding the right content in Shred faster than ever before.
For example, you can ask a question like “What projects have we done recently in the healthcare industry in the Pacific Northwest?” and get a collection of relevant projects.
Drafting: A tool that thinks like an AEC expert
Once the planning phase is done, Shred 3.0 now offers more support in helping you draft your proposal.
Chat v4: Better contextualization, deep thinking, and sourcing
Shred’s chat feature has improved with more in-depth AEC fluency. It knows the difference between proposed work and work actually delivered, between prime and subconsultant experience, and between an individual's track record and the firm's. It's more accurate and less prone to hallucinating than the previous version, and it holds onto longer documents and longer conversations without losing the thread.
A new "deep thinking" view also shows its reasoning as it works through a question (much like Claude and ChatGPT), so you can check how it landed on an answer.
Source text now shows directly in the response instead of hiding behind a citation number, and you can now chat with a pursuit's agenda and its metadata, not just the RFP content.
InDesign export
Previously, Shred users were able to drag and drop text into a formatted InDesign template on a section-by-section basis. Now, in Shred 3.0, you can send your entire draft into a default InDesign template in one motion instead of dragging narratives and images in one at a time.
Deeper integration with your OpenAsset DAM content
You can now pull information from project or employee records in your DAM—a project description, for example — into Proposal Studio, further streamlining the draft proposal process.
This will pull the exact fields and custom fields your firm has set up in their OpenAsset DAM, mirroring the data structure and organization you’re familiar with.
Regional English support
Users can now toggle an English locale setting in Shred with 4 regional options: US, UK, Canada, and Australia/New Zealand English.
Selecting a locale updates terminology, spelling, date format, measurement units, and currency across the entire Shred application — including UI copy, AI chat, and AI writer.
Closeout: Streamlining the final pass before you submit
Closeout is where deadlines are tightest, and mistakes cost the most. Shred 3.0 adds two things here that help you save time and flag issues before they snowball into bigger issues.
Draft reviewer
Shred 3.0 checks your draft against every requirement in the RFP. This gives your team a full picture of what still needs work before submission, so you have time to fix it instead of finding gaps at the last minute.
Easily send narratives to OpenAsset DAM
With every new proposal, better boilerplate text, project narratives, and updated bios get created — but they usually get lost in the shuffle before they can be used for the next proposal. For example, one marketer may know a team member updated their CV with a new certification, while another marketer is out of the loop: leading to 2 proposals with conflicting bios for that team member.
Shred 3.0 now lets you send relevant content from Shred directly into your DAM, such as updating a project or employee record, or adding a Text Asset into your Text Library. This helps make sure everyone on your team has access to the best, most up-to-date information for future proposals.
Learn more about how Shred 3.0 helps you plan, draft, and close
With these new features, Shred 3.0 now better follows the arc of a real pursuit: from planning, to drafting, to final closeout. To learn more, book a demo and see it in action.