In this blog series, Ray Meiring, CEO and co-founder of QorusDocs, shares his thoughts on the transformation of proposal and content management in a rapidly-shifting B2B tech landscape. Plus, Ray offers a behind-the-scenes look at QorusDocs’ vision and strategic path and offers insights to help your professional services organization optimize the response process and stay one step ahead of the competition.
Generative AI and its implication for business operations in 2024 and beyond is being discussed at length in organizations across the country—regardless of sector, industry, or stage of growth—as business leaders build out their tech stack to take advantage of AI-driven efficiency and productivity gains.
In this post, Ray discusses the implications of the shift in proposal management practices from using traditional AI to generative AI to manage the response process.
Not long ago, traditional AI technology for creating and managing bids and proposals was revolutionary, saving time, helping craft better proposals, and increasing win rates. Does it still do those things? Yes.
However, with the advances in generative AI (GenAI), our previous AI methods have evolved.
Generative AI is rapidly integrating into our daily apps, transforming the way we work and live in new ways.
This shift is profound, exciting, and a bit daunting. So, how do we navigate this change from old to new AI methods? Let's explore what has changed and what hasn't in proposal management using a kitchen analogy.
A kitchen analogy: The traditional AI cook and the GenAI chef
Traditional AI as the diligent cook
Imagine a busy kitchen with a stocked pantry, a recipe book, and a cook ready to prepare meals. In this analogy, ingredients are your data, the receipt is a set of instructions, and the cook is “traditional AI” available prior to generative AI. This diligent cook follows recipes exactly, producing efficient and precise meals. QorusDocs Auto Answer AI technology is an example of this type of AI, that follows this recipe:
- Analyze RFP questions
- Find potential matching Q&A content
- Score matches based on relevancy
- Return up to five matching answers
Like an experienced cook, QorusDocs Auto Answer AI drafts responses in seconds, acting as an “analyze-search-score-and-retrieve” assistant, more efficiently than a human. When you have well-organized content, this AI is the best tool for the job.
Generative AI as the inventive chef
When you need to go beyond the recipe book, you want an imaginative chef—this is the role of GenAI. This chef creates new dishes based on ingredients, expertise, and desired outcomes.
QPilot, QorusDocs’ AI Assistant using generative AI, navigates unstructured data, identifies patterns, synthesizes information, and innovates. Like a chef crafting a dish based on your preferences, QPilot interprets your prompts and generates human-like content in real-time. QPilot creatively solves problems, learns from vast datasets, and operates with autonomy. It performs tasks throughout the bid and proposal process faster and often better than a human.
You can ask QPilot to:
- Analyze a bid for a bid/no bid recommendation
- Summarize main win themes of an RFP
- Compose a biography from a resume
- Rewrite content in your desired tone
These tasks are completed in seconds, not days or hours, saving you significant time.
Transitioning to generative AI-driven proposals
As you ponder the opportunities and challenges this new tide of technology brings—and where to begin—here are the biggest changes and what remains the same when it comes to proposal management:
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Even with generative AI, humans still rule the proposal kitchen
Even with the best cooks and chefs, you still need a manager to oversee and coordinate the kitchen—and the same is true for both traditional AI and generative AI. Human input is crucial.
Just as a kitchen manager’s job is to ensure excellent output and efficiency, as the human in charge, you play a strategic and supervisory role when it comes to deploying generative AI technologies.
As a 'kitchen manager' in this setting, the responsibilities are multifaceted:
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Pre-approved ingredients for your generative AI-driven proposals
Just as good ingredients are key to making a good dish, good content is key to producing a good proposal.
As the human manager in charge of the AI, it is your responsibility to ensure that your imaginative AI chef has access to a well-stocked library of approved organizational content.
With QorusDocs, you can set up multiple sources of pre-approved content, and QPilot will augment itself on all the knowledge and data you provide.
End-users can then point QPilot to the source(s) they’d like to use, and QPilot will give incredibly accurate and relevant responses that are unique to your organization.
This process also ensures that hallucinations, a common pitfall of GenAI solutions, are kept to a minimum.
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Keep your generative AI ingredients safe in a “locked” pantry
Ensuring that your intellectual property remains private and protected is still essential—and the only way to do that with generative AI is to use a private AI model like the one that powers QorusDocs QPilot.
With a public AI model like ChatGPT, that anyone can sign up for and use, there’s a very real risk of inadvertently exposing your content and data to the world. That’s because public AI models learn from user interactions and the information users provide, which all becomes part of a shared learning pool. This makes the model better for everyone—but it comes at the cost of your privacy.
QorusDocs QPilot uses Microsoft Azure’s Open AI, a trusted enterprise-grade platform, where your content and data are exclusively for your organization’s use—not other customers, not OpenAI, not Microsoft.
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Defining the parameters within which generative AI operates
Much like deciding on the menu for the evening, the AI manager needs to set the stage and define the parameters within which the AI operates.
This means inputting prompts or data that guide the AI in the direction of your desired outcomes.
With QorusDocs, you can prime QPilot with custom instructions for each source of organizational content you point it to. These custom instructions can take the form of standards to be respected, terms to avoid, formats to follow, or all the above, and more.
Users do not even have to know about the custom instructions. They are executed with each prompt in the background, ensuring the output always respects the parameters you’ve set.
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Verifying the quality and accuracy of the output in your generative AI-driven proposal kitchen
As the manager, it’s your job to ensure quality control.
Just as the kitchen manager checks dishes before they reach the customer, ensuring every plate meets the established standards, humans still need to review, refine, and sometimes correct the outputs prepared by the imaginative AI chef.
Generative AI, as innovative and powerful as it is, can sometimes serve up unexpected or even unsuitable results based on how it interprets the data input.
Ethical considerations, compliance with standards, and even factual accuracy are tricky to navigate and best left in the much more capable hands of a human.
With QPilot, you’ll be working on content, proposals, RFPs, and pitches with the QorusDocs Add-ins directly in Microsoft Office—where it’s easy to review, modify, select, insert, and freely edit all the GenAI-produced work.
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Generative AI can create astonishingly human-like interactions and manage complexity
When using GenAI for your proposals, the major shift comes in the new possibilities for creating content and in how you provide instructions to that content.
Traditional AI needed detailed, prescriptive instructions for simple tasks. With generative AI, you can now give natural, human-like instructions for complex tasks requiring deeper thinking. GenAI is smarter and more capable, reducing your efforts.
At QorusDocs, we offer a generative AI training course for QPilot, covering the basics to advanced prompt design. Participants create a library of custom prompts, known as “Smart Skills,” tailored to your organization. These pre-crafted prompts save time by eliminating repetitive typing and accomplishing your most common tasks quickly.
Conclusion
Generative AI is here to stay and it’s changing everything. While many are eager to embrace the change and the opportunities this new technology brings, there are many others who are eyeing GenAI wearily and wondering what it means for right now and for the future.
If you haven’t done so already, I’d encourage you to start the conversation around navigating the shift to the new way of work generative AI is bringing to the profession, and most importantly, to ask the right questions so you’re sure to find the best imaginative AI chef for your proposal kitchen.
At QorusDocs, we’ve compiled a Definitive Guide to AI in Proposal Management that includes everything you need to know to put AI to work for you and your organization. It’s a must-have resource for any bid and proposal team looking to wrap their heads around the jargon, the benefits, and the downsides of generative AI.
And of course, if you’d like to see QPilot in action, we’d love to show you. Get in touch and request a demo to see how to create fast automated AI-driven responses that win.
For additional proposal management insights from QorusDocs’ CEO, Ray Meiring, check out his personal blog. And to see firsthand the impact QorusDocs AI proposal software has had on the response process out in the real world, read our Customer Success Stories.
