From Skepticism to Confidence: How Bruker Nano Surfaces Trusted AI for Deep Technical RFPs

Overview

Bruker Nano Surfaces is part of Bruker Corporation, a global leader in advanced scientific instruments and analytical solutions. The Nano Surfaces division specializes in highly engineered technologies for surface characterization, materials analysis, and nano-scale measurement — serving industrial, academic, and research customers worldwide.

Operating in a domain that requires deep scientific expertise, precision engineering, and strict technical accuracy, Bruker Nano Surfaces participates in complex enterprise sales cycles that include highly detailed RFPs and product specification documents. As deal complexity and scale increased, the organization sought a way to streamline its response process while maintaining the highest standards of technical quality. This led Bruker Nano Surfaces to select Anchor as its response management platform.

Challenge

Extremely Technical and Resource-Intensive RFPs

Bruker Nano Surfaces’ sales process regularly involves responding to 400–500 highly detailed technical questions per RFP. These questions require in-depth product knowledge, engineering judgment, and precise language to meet customer expectations and industry standards.

Heavy Reliance on Senior Experts

To ensure accuracy and credibility, RFP responses depended heavily on senior R&D and product engineers — teams whose primary focus is innovation, product development, and roadmap execution.

This created several operational challenges:

• Excessive time investment: Each RFP consumed approximately 2 FTEs for an entire month, totaling more than 400 hours.
• Organizational bottlenecks: RFP timelines were constrained by the availability of a small number of subject-matter experts.
• Reduced focus on innovation: Critical engineering resources were repeatedly diverted from core product work.
• Increasing pressure as volume grew: As RFP frequency increased, the model became difficult to sustain.

The organization needed a way to reduce the time burden on senior engineers without compromising technical accuracy or response quality.

Solution

Introducing Anchor for High-Complexity Technical Responses

Bruker Nano Surfaces evaluated Anchor as a response management platform capable of handling highly technical, domain-specific content. Initially, teams were cautious about whether AI-driven responses could meet the rigorous standards required for nano-scale analytics and surface characterization.

POC and Expert-Guided Enablement

During the proof of concept, Anchor was trained using Bruker Nano Surfaces’ technical documentation, historical RFP responses, and product materials. Feedback from R&D and product experts was continuously incorporated to refine the quality and relevance of generated answers.

Anchor’s key capabilities included:

• High-quality technical answer generation for complex specification questions
• Context-aware responses aligned with specific products and use cases
• AI-powered refinement, allowing experts to review and improve responses in seconds
• Centralized knowledge utilization without manual tagging or ongoing maintenance

As the POC progressed, answer quality improved rapidly, building confidence across technical and commercial teams.

Why Bruker Nano Surfaces Selected Anchor

Bruker Nano Surfaces selected Anchor based on its ability to:

• Deliver consistent, high-quality responses to highly technical questions
• Significantly reduce dependency on senior engineers for initial answer creation
• Scale across future RFP volumes while maintaining strict technical standards

Anchor demonstrated that it could support the complexity of Bruker’s domain while fitting seamlessly into existing sales and engineering workflows.

Results

Anchor delivered clear and measurable outcomes during and after the POC:

60% Reduction in Time Spent per RFP

• Senior engineers transitioned from writing answers to validating and refining them
• RFP preparation time dropped by more than half

Hundreds of Engineering Hours Reclaimed

• Engineering and product teams regained time for innovation and development
• Reduced interruption to core R&D activities

Improved RFP Throughput and Predictability

• Faster response cycles with fewer delays
• Reduced bottlenecks caused by limited expert availability

Increased Confidence in AI-Assisted Responses

• 97.5% answer accuracy on generated content
• Initial skepticism gave way to trust as technical quality consistently met expectations
• Teams adopted Anchor as a reliable system for complex responses

Tight Collaboration

• Unified R&D and sales collaboration under a single, intelligent workflow

Conclusion

By adopting Anchor, Bruker Nano Surfaces transformed its approach to highly technical RFPs and product specifications. Anchor enabled the organization to reduce RFP effort by 60%, protect critical engineering capacity, and maintain the rigorous standards required in advanced scientific markets.

With Anchor, Bruker Nano Surfaces now responds to complex technical requests more efficiently and predictably — allowing its experts to focus on innovation while ensuring high-quality, confident customer responses.

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“Anchor truly grasps the depth and nuance of our technical content. The process is now faster, more structured, and far easier to manage.”

Dor Perry
Sr. Director R&D, Bruker