You can find relevant EU government tenders in minutes by combining TED’s official data with an AI tender platform that matches notices to your company profile, auto-summarises each opportunity, and tracks your bids in one place.

Quick answer

The fastest way to find EU government tenders is to:

1. Define your niche (sector, CPV codes, geography, deal size),

2. Pull data from TED and national portals, and

3. Let an AI tender platform like Skim analyse 4,500+ portals, score each opportunity on win likelihood, and generate first-draft RFP responses automatically.

Key takeaways (for busy tender teams)

• You don’t need to live inside TED. TED is the official EU tender database, but it’s not built for fast, daily prospecting by commercial teams.

• AI tender platforms sit on top of TED and 4,500+ portals, matching notices to your company profile and surfacing only what you can realistically win.

• The real time sink isn’t finding tenders – it’s deciding “bid / no bid” and writing responses. That’s where AI summarisation, scoring and RFP drafting save hundreds of hours per year.

• System integrators, consultants and mid-sized enterprises get disproportionate value from centralising all EU tenders, stakeholders and proposals into one workspace.

• If your competitor uses AI for tenders and you don’t, the deals earlier – and win them while you’re still copying PDFs into spreadsheets.

Forward this to the one person in your company who is still manually refreshing TED every morning.

Why finding EU government tenders still feels so painful

If you’ve ever tried to “keep an eye on tenders in Europe”, you already know the problem:

• TED for EU-wide procurement.

• National / regional portals.

• Sector-specific platforms.

• PDF attachments with 80 pages of legal language.

Government consultants, system integrators, and mid-sized enterprises all hit the same wall:

You can find tenders. You just can’t quickly see which ones are actually worth the effort.

That’s exactly the gap AI tender platforms like Skim are trying to close:

• Aggregate hundreds of thousands of public tender applications int

• Analyse notices from 4,500+ portals across Europe and the UK, not just TED.

• Judge each tender on likelihood of winning, based on your past bids and preferences.

So let’s turn this into a concrete, step-by-step playbook you can actually use.

Step 1: Define exactly which tenders you care about

“EU government tenders” is not a target. It’s chaos.

If you want relevant alerts (and useful AI scoring), you need four simple filters:

1. Region & jurisdictions

   • EU-wide TED notices

   • Specific member states (e.g. DACH, Nordics, UK)

   • Local/regional authorities if you work in infrastructure or public services

2. Industry & CPV codes

   • Use CPV codes to describe what you sell (e.g. 72000000 for IT services, 45000000 for construction).

   • Start with your “core” CPV codes and add 1–2 adjacent ones for expansion.

3. Deal size & contract type

   • Below a certain value, it’s noise.

   • Above a certain value, it might be too complex or political.

4. Your internal constraints

   • Languages you can deliver in

   • Geo where you can support / travel

   • Frameworks you’re already on

Write this down once. You’ll use it to configure both TED searches and any AI tender platform.

Magic line to remember: The clearer your “ideal tender profile”, the less time you spend reading the wrong PDFs.

Step 2: Use TED for coverage – not for daily work

TED is the official record of EU public procurement. It’s comprehensive and transparent – but it’s not designed for busy commercial teams who need to move fast.

Here’s how to use TED without making it your full-time job:

• Set up saved searches using your core CPV codes, geographies and value ranges.

• Use them as a sanity check to ensure your AI tool isn’t missing categories.

• Export or bookmark only the searches that consistently produce quality tenders.

TED stays your “source of truth”. Your AI tool becomes your daily filter.

Step 3: Put an AI tender platform in front of the firehose

Once you’re clear on what you want, you can let AI do the boring parts:

Platforms like Skim:

• Ingest data from TED and 4,500+ government portals.

• Match tenders to your company profile, products and past bids.

• Provide a personalised dashboard with all your opportunities in one place.

• Use TenderGPT-style models to give instant bid / no-bid recommendations.

• Generate first-draft RFP responses in minutes instead of days, using your historical answers.

For your consulting firm, mid-sized enterprise, or system integrator, that means:

• No more spreadsheets of links.

• No more “did anyone see that tender from last week?”

• No more copy-pasting boilerplate into Word at 23:00.

Skim’s own positioning sums it up well: “Win public tender applications with personalised alerts, automated summaries and centralised tracking.”

Step 4: Build a simple bid / no-bid framework (and let AI enforce it)

Most tender teams don’t lose because of bad proposal writing.
They lose because they bid on the wrong things.

Create a small, brutal checklist:

1. Are we eligible on paper?

2. Do we have a reference of similar size and complexity?

3. Are we already known to the buyer (or do we have a partner who is)?

4. Is the margin acceptable after delivery risk?

5. Do we have capacity in the delivery team during the contract period?

Give each tender a score (e.g. 0–10) based on this.

Then:

• Ask your AI tender platform to surface these factors clearly for each opportunity.

• Use AI summaries to pull out mandatory criteria, delivery timelines and reference requirements.

Over time, Skim’s agent learns from your feedback (what you bid on and what you ignore) and improves its win-likelihood estimates.

Internal rule of thumb: If the AI score and your gut disagree every time, your gut is probably wrong – or your settings are. Fix one.

Step 5: Centralise all tenders, stakeholders and documents

In most organisations, this is the real mess:

• Sales sees tenders first.

• Legal gets involved three days before deadline.

• Delivery hears about the project after the contract is signed.

A proper tender workspace (like Skim) becomes your single source of truth:

• Every tender has an owner, status and deadline.

• All Q&A, clarifications and addenda live in one thread.

• Drafts, attachments and final submissions are searchable and reusable.

• Consultants or system integrator partners can be added to specific projects without seeing everything.

This is especially valuable for system integrators, who manage multiple subcontractors and must coordinate complex technical responses across borders.

Step 6: Turn every bid into training data

Every tender you touch is free training data for your future bids.

A simple loop:

1. Store every question and your final approved answer in your AI tender platform.

2. Tag each answer with sector, solution, geography, value range, and win / loss outcome.

3. Let the platform’s models learn your tone, risk posture, and preferred positioning. 

Next time a similar tender appears:

• You get instant suggested answers based on what has actually worked for you before.

• Your team edits instead of starting from a blank page.

The more bids you run through this loop, the more your AI feels like a seasoned internal bid manager.

Step 7: Measure the only three numbers that matter

Forget vanity metrics like “number of tenders monitored”.

Track these instead:

1. Time from publication → first internal view

   • With AI alerts, this should drop to hours, not days.

2. Time from shortlist → bid / no-bid decision

   • With structured scoring + AI summaries, this should be same-day for most notices.

3. Win rate on tenders you actually decide to bid on

   • Skim’s core promise is to help teams focus only on tenders they can realistically win, increasing win rate rather than just activity.

If all three are moving in the right direction, your tender engine is healthy.

Mini example: a system integrator across 7 countries

Imagine you’re a system integrator bidding on large IT and infrastructure projects across the EU.

Old world:

• Each country’s team checks its own portals.

• HQ tries to maintain a master spreadsheet.

• You hear about perfect tenders too late, or not at all.

New world with AI:

• Skim pulls tenders from 4,500+ portals and tags them with region, CPV code, budget and scope.

• Your dashboard shows: “New cross-border IT infrastructure tender, 3 markets, value €15M, 85% fit.”

• TenderGPT summarises the requirements, flags language constraints, and compares them to your past wins.

• You loop in local partners directly inside the platform, assign each work package, and export a ready-to-submit response draft.

Same number of people. More shots on goal – and better ones.
ers & AI (answering the questions people actually ask)

Is TED free to use?

Yes. TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) is the free, official EU portal for public procurement notices. Anyone can search and reuse the data under the EU’s open data policies, including commercial tools that build services on top of TED APIs.

Why not just use TED and national portals directly?

You should – for legal certainty and coverage.
But if you’re a consultant, mid-sized enterprise or system integrator, you’ll quickly hit limits:

• No built-in win-probability scoring

• No AI summaries tailored to your business

• No central bid / no-bid workflow or document reuse

AI tender platforms like Skim exist precisely to remove those pain points while still relying on official data sources.

What exactly does Skim do?

In short:

Skim is an AI-powered tender management platform that scans thousands of EU tenders daily, matches them to your profile, suggests bid / no-bid decisions, and drafts your RFP responses using your past applications.

It’s built for companies that already understand tenders and want to scale activity without scaling headcount.

Who benefits most from AI tender tools?

From Skim’s own positioning and market focus:

• Government consultants managing bids for multiple clients

• Mid-sized enterprises with lean BD teams and some tender experience

• System integrators coordinating multi-country, multi-supplier bids

If you’ve already won a few tenders and feel “at capacity”, you’re exactly the type of team that sees immediate ROI.

Will AI replace my bid manager?

No. It replaces:

• Manual search

• First-pass eligibility checks

• Boilerplate drafting

Your bid manager becomes a decision-maker and editor, not a human PDF parser.

How to turn this article into action (in one afternoon)

Here’s a simple checklist you can literally copy into your project tool:

1. Write down your ideal tender profile (region, CPV, . Set up one or two saved searches on TED that reflect this.

2. Create a brutal bid / no-bid checklist and agree it with sales, delivery and finance.

3. Trial an AI tender platform like Skim and plug in:

   • Your profile

   • Past bids

   • Win / loss outcomes

4. Centralise all new tenders and documents into one workspace for 30 days.

5. After one month, compare:

   • Time to discover tenders

   • Time to qualify

   • Win rate on submitted bids

If those three numbers go up and your evenings come back, keep going.
If they don’t, adjust your filters – not your ambition to compete in EU tenders.