AI has made polished proposals a worthless signal. Any vendor can now generate a compelling response, complete documentation, and a convincing demo environment with a fraction of the effort previously required. The gap between what a vendor can present and what a vendor can deliver is widening, and evaluation methods built on proposal scoring, oral presentations, and reference checks are increasingly poor predictors of performance.
The mitigation is structural: stop placing weight on pre-award evaluation and give multiple vendors a low-risk opportunity to demonstrate capability through actual work, then quickly remove those who do not deliver. Let performance be the filter in the context of end-to-end outcomes, not paper. For the SMC process specifically, the same logic applies to compliance validation: automated testing harnesses that vendors run against their working systems tell CMS more than any attestation document. On KPIs, I recommend measuring the vendor ecosystem on delivered value relative to cost, tracked as trendlines, rather than certification counts or milestone completion.