Artificial Intelligence Avalanche
Proposal Team AI Readiness Assessment
Getting ready to plan 2025 business goals? AI is on everyone’s list. Integrating AI into your proposal process can significantly enhance your team's efficiency and effectiveness. Are you ready for what’s coming? Here's how to ensure your team is prepared:
1. Understand AI's Role in Proposals
Educate Your Team: Ensure everyone comprehends how AI can assist in tasks like drafting responses, analyzing RFP requirements, managing workflows, and ensuring compliance.
Educate Your Leadership: Often, the addition of AI in the proposal process is touted as a definitive resource gain, efficiency measure and capacity improvement. Understanding how Large Language Models work and the required added human review of AI output is key to managing the expectation of “magic” outcomes.
Select Appropriate Tools: Are you going to use the AI capability in your proposal software? Is your organization developing an internal capability? Or something else? Identify AI solutions that align with your team's specific needs, such as content generation, compliance checks, and data analysis tools.
2. Closely Manage AI Use
Identify Use Cases: Determine where AI can add the most value, such as automating repetitive tasks, enhancing content quality, and analyzing data for proposal customization. Understand how your chosen AI tool can meet your initial expectations and what its limitations are.
Establish Guidelines: Develop protocols for responsible AI use, including data privacy measures, ethical considerations, and quality control mechanisms. This may mean that AI use is limited to select team members instead of having a team set loose. Start small and build.
3. Invest in Training
Provide Direct Training: Offer practical sessions to help team members become comfortable with AI tools. It’s often suggested by AI experts that your team begins with non-work engagement. Play with publicly available AI tools to get a feel for its capabilities.
Encourage Collaboration: Promote an approach where AI complements human expertise. Also practice providing effective prompts to your AI resource.
Stay Updated: Keep abreast of AI advancements and continuously educate your team on new capabilities.
4. Optimize Content Management
Centralize Content: Maintain an organized database of reusable proposal content for AI tools to reference. Often your proposal software is the natural go-to resource. Just doublecheck that your team isn’t accessing content held on a SharePoint site or shared drive on a regular basis.
Structure Your Content Library Effectively (and Consistently): Ensure content is properly tagged and structured for easy retrieval by AI systems. Perform periodic SME reviews, oversight reviews, and architecture testing for anything out of place.
Maintain an Effective Content Ecosystem: Make sure your content management processes address adding net new content to your library, updating anything materially revised in individual proposals and sunsetting old content. Your writing team and your content management function need to be collaborative in this ecosystem. Take an honest assessment of your knowledge management system health.
5. Establish Oversight Policies
AI Policy: If your organization has published an AI policy, make sure your practices adhere to the requirements. If a policy is in development, ask to be involved so that your process is included in its scope.
AI Disclosure Requirements: Make sure that your oversight entities – legal, compliance or risk management – provide disclosure language and where the disclosure is required (on the cover of a proposal? On the back page with other requirements? Nothing required?). Build this into your core proposal process and QC process if necessary.
6. Monitor and Refine
Evaluate Performance: Regularly assess how AI tools impact productivity, quality, and success rates.
Gather Feedback: Encourage team input on AI effectiveness and areas for improvement.
Iterate Processes: Refine AI integration based on performance metrics and feedback.
7. Maintain Human Oversight
Review AI Outputs: Always have human experts review AI-generated content for accuracy and relevance.
Prepare for Challenges: Develop contingency plans to address scenarios where AI may underperform. What is your back-up plan?
Keeping these steps in mind, your proposal team can plan to begin or further integrate AI into your proposal process in 2025. Remember that deficiencies will raise their heads as you start down the AI path – be forewarned. It may also be helpful to engage a third party as you address issues that need a quick resolution before the AI spotlight shines too brightly. Often a third party can offer proven, best-practice solutions and neutrally engage your organization to influence helpful changes.
Cheers, and happy holidays!
