Bid and proposal professionals across industries are adapting quickly to new artificial intelligence (AI) tools and features. While this new technology is poised to solve many professionals’ daily challenges, many of them are concerned about AI replacing their jobs.

At Qvidian, we understand the value of human expertise. With over 40+ years of industry experience, we know that bid and proposal professionals bring critical insight (and just a little bit of magic) to every proposal they create. That’s why we’re focused on building AI tools that enhance our users’ workflows, so they can focus on refining content to perfection rather than recreating the wheel.

The key to maintaining this balance is simple: allow humans and computers to collaborate and you’ll get great results. As AI tools continue to make their way into the daily-technologies professionals use, it’s important to explore how humans and computers can collaborate to create stellar results while saving valuable time.

Here are just a few of the ways humans can collaborate with AI

Use generative AI to get the creative juices flowing

One thing all proposal professionals know: consistently writing new proposal content takes a lot of creative energy. It’s no surprise that the modern bid and proposal specialist could use a little help getting the creative juices flowing, on average, they’re tasked with completing hundreds of proposals a year!  

Generative AI can be used to get those creative juices flowing. Rather than thinking of the sentences or passages generative AI creates as final products, professionals can use them as jumping off points for writing proposal content. Asking generative AI to come up with an introductory sentence, an outline for a longer section, or a brief biography can light a spark of inspiration in the busy brains of proposal professionals, giving them the initial push they need to start writing. 

Additionally, since a traditional AI model will pull from content already in your library, it can apply passive context to your newly generated responses, relying on your existing content as reference material. This makes it even easier to go from first draft to final project! 

Use generative AI to rephrase existing content

We’ve talked to lots of bid and proposal specialists throughout our decades of experience, and the vast majority of them routinely use the same or similar content across proposals. The pain point for these types of professionals is not necessarily generating new content, it’s customizing existing content to fit the unique needs of the client. 

Often when people talk about generative AI, they put it in terms of generating new content. However, a great way of collaborating with AI is to use it to rewrite or revise existing content. Instead of spending hours fine-tuning unique sentences for each RFP they respond to, professionals can use generative AI to rewrite existing content for the new client. This could be rewriting a sentence to be shorter, revising a passage into an active or passive voice, or asking generative AI to include more industry-focused words in a product and services overview. 

Use generative AI to translate key information

We’ll be honest: translating content from one language to another can be incredibly complicated. Translators can provide much needed additional context, country or region-specific vocabulary, and a nuanced understanding of a foreign language that’s hard to replace with generative AI.

However, professionals can still take advantage of generative AI for translation by asking for translation help on specific content tasks. For example, an American company might be seeking to expand their international operations by responding to UK-based RFPs. While American English and British English are closely linked, they have some fundamental differences. American professionals could use generative AI to translate their content into British English, where certain words or phrases would be replaced with their British counterparts.

Additionally, professionals could use generative AI to analyze and translate foreign RFPs. This could give them an initial and rudimentary outline of the types of content requested, allowing them to start gathering the content they’ll need well before their foreign-language specialists join the project.

Use AI to automate routine tasks

At Qvidian we’ve been using a form of AI to automate routine tasks for decades now, so we know just how much time this form of automation can save busy professionals. AI can be used to automate many types of routine tasks like: 

• Automatically assigning content to the relevant professional
• Scanning an RFP and pulling out key details and requirements
• Scanning a content library to suggest relevant existing content

The key here is that AI isn’t always generating new content from scratch, instead it’s simply eliminating the day-to-day tasks that waste professionals’ time. This type of automation might seem small at first, but it adds up to big gains in overall productivity!

Use AI to gather insights on data

Many platforms already use some form of AI to provide valuable insights to customers. At Qvidian, our analytics dashboards give customers a better understanding of their overall content success rates, allowing them to make more strategic decisions. As AI continues to develop and improve, professionals can use AI to gather insights on large datasets. 

Here are a few ways to use AI for gathering data:
• Using AI to scan large company datasets for key figures to use in sales presentations and proposals.
• Asking generative AI to summarize key findings from a data source in a few bullet points.
• Asking AI to clean-up a set of data, such as removing all blank or null values.

Always check generative AI for errors

While generative AI can be a powerful tool, it’s no replacement for the knowledge and insight of a bid and proposal specialist. In general, generative AI relies on a Large Language Model (LLM) to mimic human speech and produce content that reads like a real human wrote it. While this works most of the time, occasionally generative AI can produce sentences or paragraphs that might sound strange to an experienced professional. 

That’s why it’s critical that bid and proposal specialists always verify any generative AI content to ensure its accurate, compliant, and sounds like it’s coming from a real person with real world expertise. At Qvidian, we make it easy for professionals to identify generative AI content by automatically flagging all generative responses. This ensures that professionals always remain a vital part of the generative process. 

The key to success: human and AI collaboration

As AI continues to improve there’s no doubt it will transform the way that humans and computers interact. The key to setting up a sustainable and accurate proposal process using AI is to continually seek out new ways for humans and computers to collaborate not compete. By combining the powerful industry-expertise of bid and proposal professionals with the revolutionary technological capabilities of AI, organizations can save valuable time on every proposal and win more.