Best AI tools for Proposal Writing (in late-2023 – Who knows where we’ll be in a year from now!)

For those of us who have been doing this for a few years it feels like cheating to use AI during the process of writing proposals and in a professional setting generally but it’s probably a feeling we need to get past. If it’s going to put us out of a job in a few years time then the least we can do is benefit from it now to keep ourselves competitive for a bit! It’s increasingly becoming the norm, with Microsoft launching their own product ‘Copilot’ incorporated into Word soon to make it fully mainstream, so it is fair to assume your biggest competitors are already using AI.

I’m happy to say that it’s not going to do everything for the Proposal Writer just yet and it won’t take all of the creative joy from the process. The output is only as good as the quality of the input and then of the subsequent review and editing to give it your (wonderfully human) tone of voice. One thing to try to enjoy in this window of early AI adoption is that having become used to meeting unrealistic deadlines, with the help of AI we should have more time to focus on the final tweaks and polish that can really make a difference.

If you’re not using AI at all then however good your output is you are doomed I’m afraid to say, so here’s a list of tools for you to try. I’ll be adding to the list over time, and then dissecting each in further posts. These ones are as tried-and-tested as they come given that it’s such a new thing:

1. ChatGPT
2. Copy.ai
3. Microsoft 365 ‘Copilot’
4. Claude
5. …

The good thing about AI is that if they get on your nerves too much you can lob a glass of water on them and that should put them out of action for a while. (At the very least they have to sit in a jar of rice for a week until they’ve dried out)