This is a guest post by Darrell Woodward, a bidding expert who is pioneering proposal automation, bidding with AI, and bidding using social media intel.
He’s the owner of Prosfora Solutions—a firm you should check out if you’re interested in proposal automation—and shares actionable tips and useful insights in LinkedIn/Darrell Woorward
In a land of AI, our brains would be a wonder
Imagine, for a moment, a strange parallel universe in which proposals are and always have been written by powerful artificial intelligence. These AIs bid on every RFP they can find because it only takes a few seconds. The problem is: they all respond in the same way. The answer is the answer. There’s no attempt to persuade and no differentiation.
Imagine a technology capable of abstract thinking, intuition, empathy, and strategic planning
One day, someone invents an advanced organic brain. In many ways, it’s inferior to the AIs but it has strange qualities never seen before. This brain can think in the abstract, it can make decisions with insufficient information, it can formulate long-term strategies, and it can imagine what another mind might be thinking.
The proposal AIs instantly recognise the power of this Organic Brain (OB) technology. For them, the OBs are glacially slow but that doesn’t matter. Working in a partnership, the AIs are happy to do all the fast data processing, pattern matching, and calculations, while their OB assistants slowly think about creative ways to win. Proposals are transformed: each one is unique and crafted to meet a deeper need than answering the question.
Meanwhile, in the land of abstract thinking, intuition and empathy…
Artificial Intelligence has all the knowledge but no wisdom
Back in our universe, our abstractly-thinking, intuitive, and empathetic OBs instinctively recognise that the world of proposals, bids, and RFP responses is changing. Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept nor a tortured plot device for a bad sci-fi movie about a parallel universe. It’s here, it’s real, and ready to assist us to transform our proposal process. It doesn’t think in the way we understand it and it has no imagination. It has all the knowledge but no wisdom.
So much for AI.
…Or is it? Because it does do some things exceptionally well. It’s fast, efficient, and tireless. We humans are creative, inventive and adaptable, which means we can use AI to our own benefit.
“The mind is built for levels of reasoning, flexibility, creativity and abstract thinking that AI still hasn’t replicated.” – Xaq Pitkow, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University
Connecting and compounding the human-AI advantage
Together, humans and AI complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. By automating repetitive tasks, AI frees up human experts to focus on what matters most: quality. With more time, writers can explore multiple content options, iterate on ideas, and conduct even better reviews.
Working in partnership, we increase our efficiency, which enhances our wellbeing, which makes us more creative, which improves the quality of our proposals, which helps us win more.
For the first time, we can use speed as a catalyst and derive Quality from Quantity: using AI to generate a variety of content options, giving us more to work with and refine.
The Winning Formula
AI and humans working together create a winning formula:
Speed + Insight = Quality
AI brings the speed: automating repetitive tasks, making sense of complex and distributed data, drafting and revising content. We bring our unique human insight to repurpose our time for more creative work, understand information and make intuitive connections, and writing proposals with empathy and soul.
AI isn’t a replacement for human expertise. It isn’t a productivity tool to drive human workers harder or blindly bid more. It isn’t an autonomous writer of perfect content.
It can be a powerful partner, an astute assistant, and a collaborative colleague. Because, as seemingly clever and capable as artificial intelligence may seem, proposal AIs need us more than we need them. In bids and proposals the human touch remains vital.
This post was originally posted by Darrell Woodward on LinkedIn >>
To learn more about what he does in proposal automation, check his company here >>
