Vantagepoint AI for RFP and SOQ responses: what Deltek Dela does and doesn't do

By Yermek Ibray, Founder & CEO of SalemWise. Published October 14, 2026. Every Deltek fact below comes from Deltek's own release notes, help pages or blog, checked October 14, 2026, and each one links to its source.

Want to talk it through for your own pursuits? Book a free 30-minute call. Bring one RFQ you are chasing.

What does Dela do in Vantagepoint today?

Dela is Deltek's name for its AI. In Deltek's words, "Dela encompasses all of Deltek's AI capabilities and is the brand umbrella used to describe innovative AI product features across the Deltek platform" (Deltek, checked October 14, 2026). Inside Vantagepoint, the part a proposal team meets is Ask Dela, a chat assistant over your Vantagepoint data. Here is what the last three releases shipped, from Deltek's own release notes:

• Vantagepoint 2026.1 (December 19, 2025): chat with contract documents. "You can now interact with contract documents directly from the Contracts grid and the Documents dialog box." The file types: "Supported file types include text-based PDF, Word, RTF, and TXT." (2026.1 release notes, checked October 14, 2026)
• 2026.1, as Deltek describes it in March 2026: wider record search. "Ask Dela's scope expands beyond standard records; it now searches user-defined hubs, fields, and grids and returns aggregated results across projects, contacts, firms, and employees." (Deltek, March 17, 2026, checked October 14, 2026)
• Vantagepoint 2026.2 (March 13, 2026): a contract agent setting. "A new configuration option called Dela Contract Management Agent has also been added to the Option form of Dela settings." The same release added Policy Documents, where "Documents are processed through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)" to guide expense approvals, and Employee Document Templates, which "Export employee data into Microsoft Office documents like resumes, bios, or client-facing reports" (2026.2 release notes, checked October 14, 2026)
• Vantagepoint 2026.3 (June 15, 2026): project files on contracts. "You can now choose to associate existing project files with the Contract Management Grid in Vantagepoint." (2026.3 release notes, checked October 14, 2026)

So the shipped AI is about records and contracts: questions over what Vantagepoint holds, and reading contract documents someone uploaded to a project. That is useful after you win. It is not yet the part that writes the response.

Is there an AI RFP or proposal feature in Vantagepoint yet?

Not as a released feature, as of October 14, 2026. Deltek announced one at ProjectCon 2025, in a post headed "Here is a glimpse into what's coming in Vantagepoint to better support your business development and marketing." Item 4 on that roadmap is the AI Proposal Builder: "Upload an RFP and let AI handle the groundwork: parsing requirements, assigning tasks, recommending the right project examples, and generating a first draft using content from past winning proposals." Item 3 on the same roadmap, AI Pursuit Scoring, would "analyze your firm's historical win factors" (Deltek, November 19, 2025, checked October 14, 2026).

We read the 2026.1, 2026.2 and 2026.3 release notes end to end. None of them mentions an RFP feature, and the only proposal item is a formatting fix: an opt-in to stop Aspose conversion "if you have been experiencing formatting issues when exporting custom proposals." So the AI Proposal Builder and AI Pursuit Scoring are announced roadmap items with no release date we could find. Ask your Deltek rep which release ships them and whether your edition includes them.

Two things are worth noticing in Deltek's own description. The roadmap Proposal Builder drafts "using content from past winning proposals", so it reuses what your marketing team has already written. And the shipped Ask Dela reads "text-based" files, so image-only scans are not on its list.

What does Vantagepoint already do for proposals without AI?

Quite a lot, if your team keeps it fed. Deltek's help says: "If you have CRM Plus, you can create proposals to sell your firm's services and win new business. Proposals contain all the information about your firm, your employees, and your previous work that prospective clients want to know before they award a contract." (Deltek help, Create a Proposal, checked October 14, 2026). Each project record has a Proposals tab "to enter a project's background or history information, including project codes, descriptions, awards received, and associated proposals" (Deltek help, Proposals tab, checked October 14, 2026). And since 2026.2, Employee Document Templates turn employee fields into résumés and bios, as quoted above.

That is template work, and it is good template work. Its limit is the same as any proposal library: it can only reuse what someone typed into Vantagepoint.

Which parts of an SOQ can Vantagepoint and Dela do today?

Status as of October 14, 2026, from the Deltek sources above.

Want to see the archive column answered with page citations? Book a free 30-minute call, or try the live demo with a fictional sample firm.

Where do the answers to an SOQ question actually live?

Read a typical water or transportation RFQ. It asks for similar projects from the last five years with their size, the standards that applied, the contract amount, the key staff and what they did. Vantagepoint is strong on the last three if your team keeps the records current: who, when, how much. The first two usually sit in the project files: the final report, the basis-of-design memo, the plan set. A project finished last year may have no write-up at all.

That is why the date of the roadmap matters less than its input. A drafting feature that works from "past winning proposals" helps most where the past proposals already say what the new RFQ asks. Where they don't, someone still opens the old report.

Our Deltek Dela review goes deeper on the archive question for civil firms.

What should you ask your Deltek rep before you plan around Dela for RFPs?

• Which Vantagepoint release ships the announced AI Proposal Builder, and is that date in writing?
• Is it included in our edition and licence, or priced separately? Does it need CRM Plus?
• Does it read only past proposals and Vantagepoint records, or also project files on our network drives, SharePoint and ProjectWise?
• Can it read image-only scans, or only text-based PDF, Word, RTF and TXT like Ask Dela's document chat?
• Does each drafted sentence point to the page it came from, so a reviewer can check it?
• What does the Dela Contract Management Agent setting in 2026.2 do in our version, and does it touch proposals at all?
• Where is our data processed when Ask Dela reads a file or a record, and is any of it retained?
• Will you run it on three of our real RFQs, not a canned demo, before we renew?

How can a firm on Vantagepoint answer RFPs faster now?

You do not have to wait for the roadmap, and you do not have to leave Vantagepoint.

1. Feed what you already own. Write a project description within a month of closeout, and turn on Employee Document Templates if you are on 2026.2 or later. This costs staff time, not software.
2. Keep a written go/no-go scorecard. Our go/no-go guide has one.
3. Add a proposal-content tool if the bottleneck is formatting and reuse. We compare several honestly: Unanet ProposalAI, OpenAsset and SOQDraft.
4. Add archive search if the bottleneck is digging. Corpus by SalemWise reads the project files themselves (reports, specs, bid tabs, plan sets and RFQs), counts your similar projects against the RFQ and drafts SOQ sections with page citations to check, while a person writes what the archive cannot know. You keep Vantagepoint and carry the cited facts into it. Set up for you: in full deployment we connect your network drives, SharePoint or ProjectWise and OCR scanned sheets during setup. No connector is ready-made; each is built for your archive during setup. The pilot needs no connection: it runs on a copy of your project PDFs. Set up for you: Corpus is cloud-agnostic. It runs on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or your own servers.

When is Corpus the wrong choice for a Vantagepoint firm?

• Your write-ups are current. If marketing keeps project descriptions and résumés up to date in Vantagepoint, and your RFQs rarely ask for detail beyond them, the Custom Proposals tools and a good coordinator are enough.
• You want one vendor, and you can wait. If your rep gives you a release date for the announced AI Proposal Builder in writing and you would rather keep everything inside Vantagepoint, wait for it and test it on real RFQs.
• You pursue a handful of jobs a year. Setup starts at $21,000. With only a few SOQs a year, check whether the hours your team spends digging would cover that before you start.
• Your archive is mostly paper. Corpus searches digital files. Boxes of unscanned drawings need scanning first, whatever tool you pick.
• Nobody will check the citations. Corpus drafts with page citations so a person can check them. If the draft goes out unread, any AI tool is a risk.

Sources

• Deltek, "Meet Dela", deltek.com/en/innovation/ai, checked October 14, 2026.
• Deltek Vantagepoint 2026.1 release notes, release date December 19, 2025: contract documents in Ask Dela, checked October 14, 2026.
• Deltek, "Keep Projects on Track: What's New in Deltek Vantagepoint", March 17, 2026: expanded Ask Dela reach, checked October 14, 2026.
• Deltek Vantagepoint 2026.2 release notes, release date March 13, 2026: Dela Contract Management Agent option, Policy Documents, Employee Document Templates, checked October 14, 2026.
• Deltek Vantagepoint 2026.3 release notes, release date June 15, 2026: project files in the Contract Management grid, checked October 14, 2026.
• Deltek, ProjectCon 2025 post, November 19, 2025: the announced AI Proposal Builder and AI Pursuit Scoring, roadmap only, checked October 14, 2026.
• Deltek help, Vantagepoint 7.0: Create a Proposal, Proposals tab and Use Ask Dela, checked October 14, 2026.

Next step

Start with a free 30-minute call. Bring one RFQ and tell us where your archive lives; if Corpus is not a fit, we will say so. If it fits, the next step is a $5,000 pilot on one real pursuit: about 2 to 3 weeks on a copy of up to 3 years of your project PDFs, credited toward setup if you sign a deployment within 60 days of the pilot's end. Full deployment is setup from $21,000, then $1,500–$2,000/mo. Book a free 30-minute call, read how the pilot works, or see Corpus.