Marine Solutions: Turning AI Strategy Into a Repeatable Advantage

About Marine Solutions

Marine Solutions has built its reputation by taking on some of the most complex challenges in marine and bridge infrastructure, combining engineering, marine construction, inspection, and commercial diving expertise to deliver critical projects from start to finish. Their work spans commercial and public infrastructure as well as mission-critical federal projects. That same willingness to tackle complex work and embrace new approaches has shaped how the company thinks about technology. Rather than waiting for AI to become standard across the industry, Marine Solutions chose to move early, making AI a strategic initiative. Their work with Valent began with proposals, but with a larger ambition: turn AI from individual experimentation into a secure, scalable capability that creates value across the company.

The Challenge

Before Valent, much of Marine Solutions’ proposal process was highly manual. Solicitation requirements had to be reviewed and organized, information gathered from stakeholders, and responses coordinated across teams. It worked, but it was labor-intensive and left “a lot of room for error,” as Jordan Furlan, Western Regional Director at Marine Solutions, Inc., who oversees much of the company’s proposal process, put it.

AI wasn’t foreign to the team, but it was fragmented. “We didn’t have an official corporate implementation,” Furlan explained. “It was more of an ad hoc individual use, where people were just experimenting on their own with whatever service they were signed up for.” That also meant less consistency and control over how AI was being used, including questions around privacy and data handling.

Those gaps mattered most where the stakes were highest. On the construction side of the business, the pressure was building. “We’re looking at much larger projects, which have much larger RFPs,” said Don Wilkins, SVP and Director of Construction at Marine Solutions. “With RFPs at times 500 to 600 pages, it became quite difficult to retain the information, organize, and ensure we didn’t miss specifics with the staff size we have.” Parsing large, complex bids was simply too much information to work through under the old method, and the general-purpose AI tools people had been experimenting with weren’t built for it.

Marine Solutions had already named AI as a strategic initiative. What they needed was a way to act on it.

Why Valent

What set Valent apart wasn’t a feature list. It was a willingness to be hands on and build the product around how Marine Solutions actually works. “We wanted access to the people building the product,” said Amy Wilkins, President of Marine Solutions. “We wanted to say, ‘This is how our industry works, this is what we’re trying to accomplish. Can we solve it together?’ And we’ve been able to have those conversations with Valent.”

Furlan pointed to that same responsiveness and readiness to work alongside his team to build out the platform and add the features they needed. Rather than forcing the team to bend their workflow to fit rigid software, Valent adapted its outputs and templates to the way the engineering and construction teams already operate. As Amy Wilkins put it, “That’s really the benefit of having a partnership, rather than simply licensing software.”

Onboarding

The rollout was fast and expectations were set clearly. “Relatively quickly, in a matter of a couple of weeks, we were getting good results,” Furlan said. “It’s a very usable product right out of the box, and it just gets better as you add information to it.”

Adoption spread easily, even to first-time AI users. “We have users who had never used it at all until they got into Valent,” said Don Wilkins. “I bring somebody into my office, we look at our screen next to theirs, and in five minutes they’re up and running, asking it questions and getting real results.”

The Impact

Today, Marine Solutions leans on Valent most heavily for two things: collaboratively drafting responses and drilling into requirements. As Furlan described it, the team can ask Valent to draft a response to a specific requirement or quickly surface and explain relevant requirements from hundreds of pages of solicitation documents.

The drafting gains are concrete. “The initial proposal draft phase is probably the greatest efficiency gain,” Furlan explained. “You could get the rough draft of your text 50% faster.” Quality control improved too: Valent, he noted, “does a way better job than manually trying to go through and compare things for consistency than most humans are able to do.”

On go/no-go decisions, the win wasn’t just speed. It was judgment. “We were making decisions on less information, and less quality information, in the past,” said Don Wilkins. “Now we can break those pieces out and have more confidence. It makes for a much more thorough, way better go/no-go decision.” Furlan agreed: “It probably makes our decisions better, if not faster.”

Two standout moments captured what that means in practice. Furlan won a five-day-turnaround bid the team hadn’t even planned to pursue: “I only had five days, and was able to crank that out and win it, and the client told us it was a strong proposal.” Meanwhile, on the construction side, Don Wilkins used Valent for “probably one of the largest bids we’ve ever put together, in a rather quick manner,” surfacing scope that “was buried in pages and pages and pages.” As Amy Wilkins reflected, “That particular proposal was the best-prepped I’ve ever seen, with all the answers to the potential uncertainty and risk involved.”

What surprised the team most was how far the platform’s value could extend beyond the pursuit itself. Once an opportunity becomes an active project, the information already captured in Valent can carry forward, giving the project team a resource for quickly accessing requirements, scope, commitments, risks, and other critical project information. As Furlan noted, “It rolls right into the active project phase and becomes almost like an assistant to the project team.” Amy Wilkins summed up the opportunity: “Once the data’s in there, it’s, ‘What else can we do with it?’ The sky’s the limit.”

The Verdict and the Vision

Asked whether Valent was worth it, the answer was unanimous. “Definitely worth it,” said Furlan. “It’s a powerful tool to supercharge your business development and marketing teams.” Don Wilkins added that it “helped change the construction department’s ability to view RFPs, cost analysis, and project setup. We’re doing it better now than we ever have before.” And from Amy Wilkins: “We’re seeing exactly what we hoped for when we made the investment, and honestly beyond what we had hoped for.”

Looking ahead, Marine Solutions sees a partnership, not a subscription. “Proposal development was the starting point,” said Amy Wilkins. “As Valent learns more about our business, and we learn more about what’s possible, we’ll continue identifying places where it can support the entire life cycle of our work. That’s really the benefit of having a partnership, rather than simply licensing software.”