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Finding the Right Government Opportunities Requires More Than Keyword Searching

Federal contracting solicitations typically contain an enormous amount of useful information. They describe missions, deliverables, performance requirements, eligibility restrictions, evaluation criteria and acquisition requirements. What they do not always contain is the language a contractor would naturally use to describe its own capabilities. Because of this, identifying relevant opportunities through traditional keyword searches or simple matching tools can be challenging.

For example, a company may be an excellent fit for an opportunity without sharing the same vocabulary as the agency that published it. Conversely, an opportunity may contain several familiar keywords while still being a poor fit for the company's experience, strategic direction or qualifications.

This is one of the main challenges Kleos set out to address with our tool, Xpedite.

Searching and Matching Are Fundamentally Different

Keyword searches, NAICS codes and other procurement filters do provide the ability to narrow thousands of opportunities into a manageable list. Of course, most solicitation sites provide these capabilities because they are essential for navigating the marketplace.

Xpedite’s opportunity matching system attempts to answer a different question.

Instead of simply asking, "Does this opportunity contain the words I searched for?" Xpedite asks, "Based on what a specific solicitation is really asking for, plus everything we know about a specific contractor’s capabilities, how good of a fit exists between the two?"

Consider a software company that specializes in automating complex administrative workflows. The company describes its capabilities using terms such as:

  • workflow automation
  • artificial intelligence
  • data integration
  • process improvement
  • custom software development

An agency, however, may describe its requirements very differently. Rather than emphasizing technology, the solicitation might focus on specific terms such as:

  • reducing case backlogs
  • improving internal review processes
  • modernizing legacy systems
  • increasing operational efficiency

Neither approach is wrong. Contractors naturally describe what they build, and agencies describe the mission outcomes they are trying to achieve. But this scenario still creates an obvious imbalance.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation encourages agencies to define requirements around desired results rather than prescribing exactly how contractors should accomplish them. As a result, many solicitations emphasize overall objectives, performance standards and operational needs instead of specific implementations. Consequently, a highly relevant opportunity may never use the exact terminology a contractor expects.

NAICS Codes Provide Structure, Not Complete Context

NAICS codes are obviously an important part of the federal procurement process. They classify industries, help determine size standards and provide useful structure for both agencies and contractors. However, a NAICS code alone cannot fully describe what makes a company unique.

For example, two businesses operating under the same NAICS code may have entirely different specialties. One may focus on cybersecurity, another on cloud infrastructure and another on machine learning. All three may technically belong to the same industry classification while pursuing very different kinds of work.

Additionally, many companies operate across multiple technical disciplines that cannot be fully represented by a handful of classification codes. For those reasons, we believe effective opportunity matching should consider much more than keywords or industry classifications alone.

How Xpedite Approaches Matching

At a high level, Xpedite combines structured procurement data with targeted semantic analysis to evaluate how well an opportunity aligns with a company's capabilities.

Rather than relying solely on keyword and NAICS code matches, Xpedite creates semantic representations of both the company’s capabilities and relevant solicitation content. This allows the platform to evaluate how closely the underlying concepts align, even when different terminology is used to describe similar work.

That semantic assessment is combined with additional deterministic signals such as keyword overlap, NAICS alignment, procurement characteristics, certifications, exclusions, past performance and other relevant factors.

We believe these structured signals remain important because government procurement involves far more than technical capability alone.

Looking at the Opportunity from Multiple Perspectives

One of the design decisions we made early in Xpedite's development was to avoid relying on a single AI judgment. Large language models are remarkably capable, but like any analytical tool, individual responses can vary depending on context and interpretation.

Instead, Xpedite performs multiple independent model-based reviews that evaluate the opportunity from different perspectives. Those reviews help assess the underlying requirement, the strength of the company's capability alignment, potential risks, missing qualifications and the overall strategic relevance of the opportunity. Rather than allowing any single model response to determine the outcome, those assessments are considered alongside the deterministic scoring signals. The goal is to improve consistency while reducing dependence on any one model's interpretation.

We expect this approach to continue evolving as we learn from real users and real procurement workflows, but the underlying philosophy remains the same: combine structured data with thoughtful analysis rather than relying exclusively on either one.

Explainability Matters

Perhaps the most important design goal for Xpedite is that it does not function as a black box. A numerical score by itself provides very little value if users cannot understand why it was generated. Instead, Xpedite is designed to explain its reasoning by identifying the primary factors supporting the match, highlighting relevant evidence from both the company profile and the solicitation, and surfacing potential risks or capability gaps that deserve additional review.

All that being said, Xpedite is not intended to decide whether a company should pursue an opportunity. That decision still depends on business strategy, relationships, positioning, resources and the judgment of the people responsible for capture and proposal efforts. Our goal is simply to augment those decisions with better information.

Building Better Starting Points

No opportunity matching system can replace experienced business development professionals or capture managers.

Likewise, no AI system can determine every factor that influences whether an opportunity is worth pursuing.

What tools such as Xpedite can do is reduce the amount of time spent reviewing opportunities that were never strong candidates to begin with, while helping identify promising opportunities that may have been overlooked because they were described using unfamiliar language.

We believe finding the right opportunity requires more than recognizing familiar words. It requires understanding both exactly what the agency needs and what a company is genuinely equipped to deliver.

That is the kind of matching we are building Xpedite to provide.

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