If you spend much time reading the news, you might predict that this year will go down as the year of AI. While it’s certainly true that AI (artificial intelligence) has captured the world’s imagination in recent months, it’s been busily working behind the scenes, helping proposal teams gain a competitive edge since at least 2015.
For those of us who are front-end users — as opposed to AI developers — AI technology might resemble an alphabet soup filled with head-scratching acronyms such as GenAI, LLMs, NLP, ML, DL and more.
Fortunately, to master AI in the proposal realm, you don’t need the alphabet soup recipe any more than you need the automotive blueprints to drive a car. So, rather than explore the behind-the-scenes technology, this blog post will primarily discuss generative AI (GenAI) and its current and future impact on proposal professionals as well as foundational AI.
Table of contents
- What is generative AI?
- What is foundational AI?
- How AI is revolutionizing the way we write proposals
- Can AI replace proposal writers?
- What are the benefits of leveraging AI to write proposals?
- 5 ways AI can help you write proposals
- Case studies: generating proposals with AI
- How to make the most of your proposal AI tools
- Responsive future-proofs your proposal response strategy
- Final thoughts
What is generative AI?
GenAI is a type of machine learning that generates new data or content, such as text, images, music and more, based on existing and ongoing data patterns. You may encounter GenAI in chatbots, writing assistant applications and perhaps most famously, ChatGPT.
Think of GenAI as your car’s steering wheel, floor pedals, turn signals and every other tool you use to drive the car. However, instead of responding identically to each of your physical commands, it learns from your — and, depending on settings, others’ — driving habits over time and can make suggestions.
Just as cars still require a human driver, and will likely always require human supervision, GenAI is not a replacement for humans in the creative process. Rather, it augments the process. For example, GenAI can create first drafts, but human input is paramount for professional, on-brand and accurate final versions.
What is foundational AI?
Foundational AI, like a car’s drivetrain, serves as the building blocks upon which AI systems are created. It is trained on extensive datasets to understand language, recognize patterns, and make predictions. This type of AI underpins various applications and can be seen in systems like search engines, recommendation algorithms, and even the core functionalities of generative AI.
These foundational models are designed to be versatile and can be fine-tuned for specific tasks, providing a robust base upon which other AI technologies can build. For example, a foundational AI model trained on diverse text data can be adapted to understand and generate responses for customer service, medical advice, or legal queries, depending on an organization’s specific needs.
How AI is revolutionizing the way we write proposals
In the past, proposal creation was a lengthy, redundant and frustrating process. Organizations often lacked centralized content repositories, and if they did have them, they lacked the resources to keep information up-to-date and carefully curated. As a result, teams, including busy subject matter experts (SMEs), would have to reinvent the wheel for every single response, and time to polish and refine was scarce.
It may not be accurate to say that the organizations with resources to optimize their response processes always won out, but it certainly gave them a competitive advantage.
Responsive AI, available inside the platform and on users’ computers, helps users tap into their knowledge base — which in Responsive is referred to as a Content Library — instantly, regardless of what they are working on. Any authorized person can find the answers they need to help them do their jobs.
When using the platform, GenAI is revolutionizing proposal writing and improving employee experiences by enabling them to use intuitive natural language prompts to generate first drafts and refine responses.
Foundational machine learning, or Responsive’s reasoning layer, goes several steps further by providing import/export capabilities to and from an array of formats. It powers RFx analyses and summaries to facilitate go/no-go decision-making based on past data, makes smart content recommendations from your Content Library, automates workflows, facilitates in-app collaboration, makes intelligent role assignment suggestions, provides advanced collaboration tools and more.
By leveraging these two layers (GenAI and foundational AI) in a single platform, proposal team members and SMEs merely need to edit and fine-tune answers to complete a bespoke and on-brand response. This enables small, mid-sized and enterprise organizations to create rapid, high-quality proposals for even the most complex and lengthy RFXs and other questionnaires.
Can AI replace proposal writers?
While some jobs will be affected by AI (think data entry or assembly-line work), it cannot replace proposal writers. Instead, it empowers proposal writers to be better at their jobs and, therefore, more vital to their organizations.
AI handles the most tedious and time-consuming portions of the proposal process, while humans are needed to ensure that all of the information is correct, well-written and customized for the buyer.
Or, to put it more simply, AI gets you a significant part of the way there, but it takes humans to add the touches that make the difference between an “also ran” proposal and one that wins deals.
What are the benefits of leveraging AI to write proposals?
Proposal writing, regardless of how you slice it, is stressful. Proposal professionals face tighter deadlines for increasingly longer RFXs yet are under pressure from their own organizations for efficiency, excellence, and revenue generation. Not to mention that many companies are committed to cutting costs.
To paraphrase an old adage, you can have speed, value or quality, but you can’t have them all…unless you have AI to help. AI takes much of the stress off of proposal writers’ shoulders by automating processes and providing additional time for proposal teams to put their best work forward without adding headcount. AI is a win-win-win-win for proposal professionals, salespeople, their organizations and their prospective customers.
Some of the benefits of integrating AI into proposal teams and strategies include:
- Optimizing manual processes — Automate time-consuming tasks such as questionnaire shredding and analysis, crafting first drafts from previous content, content review, document formatting and language translation.
- Improving response content — Utilize AI to analyze and enhance proposal content, ensuring clarity and relevance.
- Enabling tailored deliverables — Customize proposals with approved content that can be personalized for specific audiences.
- Scaling RFP responses — AI can handle large datasets, which means organizations can manage higher volumes of RFXs while continuing to generate high-quality responses.
- Improving work/life balance — Reduce workloads, minimize stress and enable employees to work on more satisfying aspects of their jobs.
- Enhancing collaboration — Facilitate better teamwork through AI-powered project management tools that enable improved communication and collaboration.
- Accelerating response times — Speed up the proposal creation process by quickly retrieving, utilizing and personalizing relevant information from your Content Library.
- Providing actionable insights — Use AI to analyze past proposal data to determine bid viability and provide post-mortem insights to help with future proposals.
- Supporting compliance and risk management — Locate the most up-to-date and InfoSec/legal-approved information in your AI-powered Content Library.
5 ways AI can help you write proposals
In an increasingly competitive business environment where RFXs and other questionnaires are becoming more frequent and complex, rushed proposals put bidders at a disadvantage.
With the help of AI, proposal professionals and salespeople can produce high-quality persuasive content, meet deadlines, ensure accuracy and consistency, and tailor proposals to the specific needs of prospects.
Here’s how that works:
1. Auto-response generation
One of the primary challenges in proposal writing is generating initial responses quickly and accurately. AI can significantly simplify this process through auto-response generation, adding:
- Speed and Efficiency — AI can rapidly generate draft responses to common questions, allowing proposal professionals to focus on refining and tailoring the content rather than starting from scratch.
- Consistency — By using pre-approved templates and historical data, AI ensures that responses are consistent in tone and style, aligning with the organization’s guidelines.
2. Content management
Effective content management ensures that all stakeholders have access to the most current and relevant information. AI provides tools to make quick work of content audits and maintenance, including:
- A Centralized Repository — AI-powered content management systems provide a single source of truth, housing all necessary documents, templates, and past responses in one accessible location.
- Version Control — AI helps manage different versions of documents, ensuring that team members are always working with the latest updates and avoiding confusion or duplication of efforts.
- Search and Retrieval — Advanced search capabilities powered by AI recommendations enable quick retrieval of relevant content, saving time and ensuring that the most pertinent information is used in responses.
3. Proofreading
Nobody’s perfect. While that is undeniably true, even seemingly innocuous grammatical errors can reflect poorly on your company and leave customers wondering how much care you take with other aspects of the business.
Responsive AI helps add the finishing touches to your proposal with:
- Error Detection — AI can detect grammatical errors, typos and inconsistencies that might be missed during manual proofreading, ensuring a polished and professional final document.
- Style and Tone Analysis — AI can analyze the document’s style and tone and suggest changes to ensure consistency and alignment with your brand’s voice.
- Content Enhancement — Beyond basic proofreading, AI can suggest enhancements to improve clarity, persuasiveness, and overall readability, making your proposal more compelling.
4. Workflow and project management
In most cases, proposal deadlines are final. Even when they aren’t, timeliness sends a message that you want the customer’s business and that your company is organized and well-managed.
AI keeps your projects running smoothly from the start with:
- Task Automation — AI can automate routine tasks such as sending reminders, tracking progress, and assigning tasks to team members, freeing up time for more strategic activities.
- Timeline Management — AI tools can help create and manage timelines, ensuring that all stages of the proposal process are completed on schedule.
- Collaboration — Responsive features in-app collaboration and integrates with the most popular collaboration tools, such as Slack, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams and Jira.
5. Customization and personalization
While many, if not most, questions on an RFx are versions of commonly asked questions, each prospect and project has its own specific needs. Boilerplate proposals make organizations look as though customer service and details don’t matter.
Every proposal should be customized and personalized, and AI can help with:
- Dynamic Content — AI enables you to easily customize content for different customers, ensuring that each proposal feels unique and personalized.
- Branded Templates — A wide selection of customizable branded templates ensures professionalism and consistency.
Case studies: generating proposals with AI
Responsive is the leading AI-native Strategic Response Management (SRM) solution. We’ve helped our customers win more than $500 billion in revenue.
Here are just a few of the amazing success stories:
- Saving 20-60 hours per project & reducing risk at Stibo Systems
- How Netsmart accelerates response time by 10X with AI
- How JAGGAER uses Responsive AI for double-digit win-rate increase, 15X ROI
- Data Axle gains 30-50% in productivity with dynamic response management
- Jumio increases RFP win rate by 20% and doubles response volume without adding headcount
How to make the most of your proposal AI tools
To fully leverage AI capabilities, it’s essential to ensure that all systems are integrated, allowing seamless data connection and sharing. Here’s how to go about it.
Enable system integrations
Proposal management processes typically use several applications, including CRMs, content management, communication and project management tools. To enable smooth data flow and connectivity, integrate AI with all your proposal management applications.
Responsive seamlessly integrates with nearly 30 of the most popular CRM, productivity, sales enablement applications and more. A comprehensive set of APIs enables you to build your own integrations.
Establish AI-powered content management
An effective content database is the backbone of AI automation in proposal writing. To fully leverage AI capabilities, your content database must have data that’s both structured (such as client details and deadlines) and unstructured (such as previous proposals and content templates). You should implement a robust organizational system, including tagging and categorization. Ideally, you should also make sure the system supports version control, reducing the risk of outdated or incorrect information.
Responsive’s Content Library is the industry standard. It provides a centralized single source of truth for all company knowledge, advanced search capabilities, automated review cycles and powerful deduplication, as well as organizational and version control features.
Monitor performance
Be sure to consistently monitor, measure and improve your AI functionality by analyzing how long it takes to complete single tasks, looking for code defects or changes, assessing result accuracy, etc.
How to choose a proposal management solution
The best proposal software solutions will give you key competitive advantages and propel your response process forward.
Responsive future-proofs your proposal response strategy
While some organizations choose to build their proposal management system, most lack resources and the ability to develop a system that will scale as needed.
With nearly 2,000 customers, including more than 20 percent of the Fortune 500, and more than $500 billion won through the platform, Responsive has developed the industry’s most robust and scalable AI capabilities, including:
- Best-in-class Content Library — An easily searchable and accessible central repository for storing and managing information and documents is a critical part of any proposal management system. Responsive provides lightning-fast content retrieval, automated on-brand responses, custom tagging and more.
- Industry-leading recommendation engine — Features like Auto-Respond and Ask Responsive surface the most relevant answer to any question on an RFx or assessment with the click of a button.
- Unsurpassed collaboration and project management — Communicate inside the application or with one of the industry-leading integrations. Automatically select the right project collaborators and keep your projects on track.
- Valuable data analytics — Use AI-driven analytics and insights to improve go/no-go decision-making and optimize future processes.
Final thoughts
As AI gains popularity, more “AI-driven” proposal software options enter the market seemingly every day. Few, if any, offer the functionality for end-to-end proposal management processes. In fact, most are limited to simple GenAI capabilities.
Responsive has been the industry leader in AI-driven Strategic Response Management for nearly a decade. To learn more about Responsive AI capabilities and core functionality and how it can help your organization achieve your business goals, we’d love to show you how it works.
