The 10% SaaS Problem and the Software That Replaces It

By RFP PursuitAI Team · May 6, 2026

Why A/E/C firms are walking away from sprawling SaaS suites and what is replacing them.

Most A/E/C firms I talk to use about 10% of the software they pay for.

It is not a careless number. The 14-module CRM gets used for two things: contact storage and pipeline reporting. The proposal management platform that promised end-to-end pursuit automation runs as a glorified file cabinet. The marketing automation suite with 200 features sends one templated email a quarter.

The other 90% is sitting there. The firm is paying for it. Nobody is using it.

This is not a complaint about overspending. It is a description of a market that worked one way for fifteen years and is starting to work a different way.

Why we ended up here

Off-the-shelf software was built for the total addressable market, not for your firm. The product team behind your CRM had to design for the architecture firm in San Diego, the construction company in Tampa, and the engineering shop in Minneapolis at the same time. So they built every feature any one of you could possibly want.

Then they sold it as a single suite.

Your firm bought the suite. Your team learned the parts that mapped to your workflow. Everything else became dead weight.

The cost is not just the line item on the invoice. It is the workflow distortion that comes with adopting a tool built for a generic market. Your team bends to fit the tool's data model, the tool's terminology, the tool's idea of how a pursuit should be tracked. You stop running your firm's playbook and start running the software's.

What is replacing it

A different model is emerging. Call it personalized software. Software designed around the way one specific kind of firm actually works.

This is not customization. Customization is reskinning a generic tool. Personalized software is built from the ground up around a narrow set of users with a shared workflow. It does fewer things. The things it does are the things you actually do every day.

The shift in framing matters. The old question was what does this tool do. The new question is what does this tool know about us, and what does it stop us from doing twice.

Put another way: it is no longer about the bells and whistles. It is about the targeted use of what we have. We do not care that the software can wash all the different cars. We care that it can wash our car.

Three things change when a firm adopts personalized software

The first thing is time allocation on the work that matters. In a typical A/E/C proposal pursuit, 60% of the senior time is spent producing the response: compliance matrices, past performance lookups, gathering and drafting from old pursuits, narrative framing. The remaining 40% is the work that actually wins: the differentiators, the win themes, the strategy section a principal rewrites three times. Personalized software inverts the ratio. The producible 60% gets handled. The strategic 40% gets the attention.

The second thing is data security. When a firm relies on generic AI tools, every staff member ends up with their own workaround. Someone is pasting solicitation language into a public chatbot to get a head start. Someone else is using a personal account to format a resume. Each one of those individual decisions is small. The aggregate is a security profile no firm signed off on. Personalized software is built with the firm as the customer, which means the firm's data lives inside the firm's environment, not somewhere on a vendor's general-purpose stack.

The third thing is the part nobody talks about until it happens. When a senior proposal coordinator leaves a firm, fifteen years of institutional knowledge leaves with them. The way they framed past performance for transportation pursuits. The boilerplate they had refined for water clients. The win themes they reused across geotechnical bids. If that knowledge lived in their head, or in their personal AI tool history, it walks out the door. Personalized software keeps that knowledge inside the firm. The next coordinator inherits it instead of starting over.

A practical example

We built [RFP PursuitAI Hub](/platform) on this thesis. It is purpose-built for A/E/C pursuits. Public works, transportation, water, vertical construction. It does fewer things than a generic AI suite. The things it does are the things every A/E/C proposal team does on every pursuit.

Each firm gets a curated workspace, the Proposal Brain, where their vetted past performance, narrative templates, and team resumes live. Compliance matrices get parsed against Section L and M in the first 24 hours of a pursuit. Past performance gets retrieved against evaluation criteria, not keyword-matched. Resumes get reformatted to each solicitation's spec from a single source of truth.

Senior people stop being producers and become reviewers. Coordinators stop being formatters and become strategists. The firm's voice and IP compound inside one workspace, not across ten people's chat histories.

What to do if you are buying software this year

If your firm is on its tenth evaluation of a generic AI tool, pause and run a different audit first.

Look at the SaaS contracts on your books. For each one, ask which percentage of the platform your team actually uses. If the answer is 10 to 30%, you are paying full freight for something that fits poorly. That is not a discipline problem inside your firm. It is a fit problem in the product.

The follow-up question is harder. What would software that fit your firm exactly do that the current tool does not. The answer is usually the work your senior people are doing manually because the generic tool cannot model their workflow.

That is the work to automate next. That is the work personalized software is built to do.

If A/E/C-specific is the question, a 30-minute demo will give you a clearer answer than an evaluation matrix. Book one here: https://calendly.com/ownyournext/rfp-pursuitai-hub-call.