Why do quotes arrive with a competitor’s specification?
Direct Answer
The same G2 survey that found 51% of B2B decision-makers now start research with a chatbot more often than with Google also found that chatbots rank as the number one source of influence on the supplier shortlist, and 69% of respondents changed their choice of supplier because of what a chatbot told them. If your competitor is the company an assistant can describe in detail and yours is not, a buyer asking that assistant to help draft a request is likely to inherit the competitor’s specification without either of them noticing it happened.
From an easy question to a written requirement
Nobody sits down to copy a competitor on purpose. The path is more ordinary than that, and it runs through convenience, not through malice.
Four Steps to a Biased RFQ
A thesis extended from one data point, not a measurement
No public study counts how many RFQs are drafted with AI assistance in industrial procurement, or measures how often the resulting specification favors one named supplier. What exists is the G2 survey of 1,076 B2B software decision-makers, which documents that chatbot guidance changes supplier choice for a majority of respondents in that sample.
For Roberto Wydra, founder of RudekWydra, extending that mechanism to a written quote request is a reasonable inference, not a proven fact: "If a chatbot already changes which supplier a buyer picks, it is not a stretch that the same chatbot shapes the words the buyer writes down when asking for a price", he says. Treat this section as reasoning about a plausible mechanism, and verify it in your own pipeline by asking a buyer, when a quote arrives with an unusual specification, where that wording came from.
Three signs worth a second look
Read the Request Before You Answer It
Ask, do not assume the specification is fixed
The commercial response is not to refuse the RFQ or to quote against a specification you know favors someone else. It is to ask the buyer, directly, what problem that parameter is meant to solve, and to offer your own equivalent in writing. A buyer who copied a suggestion usually has no attachment to the exact wording, only to the underlying need.
The upstream fix is publishing your own specifications clearly enough that an assistant can describe them as easily as it describes the competitor’s. When that quote never converts into an order, the same pattern is examined from the other side in why so many quotes never become an order. See how to compare industrial proposals on the same scope.
FAQ
Why do quotes arrive with a competitor’s specification? +
Is there a study that measures AI-written RFQs in industry? +
How do I recognize a request written this way? +
Should I quote against a specification I believe favors a competitor? +
What is the upstream fix for this pattern? +
Does this only happen with AI assistants, or did it happen before too? +
What happens if that quote never turns into an order? +
Where does the shortlist that leads to this RFQ get formed? +
Make your own specification the one the AI describes
If an assistant cannot describe your product clearly, it will keep filling in requests with the specification it already knows — and that specification is not yours.