Introduction

Over the years Ive seen how shifts in technology can help to link people, processes and systems together by infusing harmony into a workflow or automation routine. These days Im usually talking about this in relation to the Metaverse but for today, Im going to step back and throw on one of my old hats. I am many things, one of which is the former Director of Professional Service for a software company that specialized in collaborative proposals and workflow automation. My expertise included onboarding new clients, streamlining the proposal process, and outlining workflow efficiencies with our Process Designer and Resume Manager solutions. With the onset of the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI), proposal development stands at the threshold of this transformative era. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an advanced language model, is at the forefront of this change, among other contenders like Google’s Bard and Stability AIs Stable Diffusion. These tools offer an evolving suite of capabilities that will help you Augment Your Creativity, in this case refining the approach to the bid, capture and propose process. Let’s explore the enormous potential of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence in enhancing the bid, capture, and proposal process.

ChatGPT: A Game-Changer in Collaborative Proposals

The value-add of ChatGPT lies in its ability to generate coherent and contextually relevant text, sometimes en masse. This capability extends to proposal writing too. Simply type in a prompt to make a request and within moments you have the one thing every proposal team needs – relevant content. When used correctly, AI can help draft initial responses, brainstorm ideas, automate routine tasks, and suggest meaningful inputs for various proposal sections.

AI as an Ally, Not a Replacement

When used correctly, artificial intelligence can supplement our resources and teams, enabling productivity at a grander scale…but it is not meant to supplant us. In other words, its imperative to understand that ChatGPT is not here to replace human expertise but to enhance it. Our job is to augment our creativity, in this case, proposal development by understanding and utilizing AI capabilities to create winning proposals. If you are among the millions that don’t know how to use it or just want to be more effective in your use of it? Check the links at the bottom to gain access to a training session to equip you to do just that.

While ChatGPT brings immense capabilities to the table, it’s not here to replace your team or your best team members. Instead, it is here to enhance what we do best understanding our customer’s needs, leveraging our collective expertise, and delivering winning proposals. In the spirit of collaborative creation, this is a game changer for bid, capture and win. It’s about forging a powerful human-AI collaboration that brings greater efficiency and effectiveness to our work. It may sound a bit cliche but arent you more effective when you leverage the tools at your disposal?

AI as a Contributor

Maybe it’s time to power up your bid, capture and win process and empower your core team to get a good night’s rest. Use it to help draft initial responses to the RFP, offer the writing team some fresh perspectives, or assist with brainstorming sessions. It can even help analyze vast amounts of data for competitive pricing insights or generate ideas for impactful data visualization. Imagine how valuable it could be to include ‘AI-as-a-Contributor’ in your proposal process, assisting with tasks such as competitive analysis and researching competitive pricing.

Going Beyond the Draft

It’s not just about drafting content. AI can help with the theming and brainstorming processes also. Need more hands on deck but working with a limited budget? Proposal teams are often overworked, under pressure and in high demand. So how about augmenting the team? AIs, like ChatGPT, can also help with the routine yet essential tasks, such as formatting, proofreading, and ensuring compliance with RFP guidelines – is there any professional on the proposal team that couldnt use some additional support? ChatGPT can also give an assist for the “GO” or “NO-GO” decision process by summarizing complex documents and identifying key requirements, providing data-driven insights to inform this crucial step. The final call will continue to be verified, vetted and enriched by human expertise and strategic considerations, and should always remain a human responsibility.

At each proposal stage from Pre-Proposal (planning, teaming, strategy development), to Proposal (kick-off, writing, reviews), to Post-Proposal (submission, lessons learned, BAFO) ChatGPT can offer a helping hand. Its like an extra team member (or two or three), who is available 24/7 and eager to provide assistance whenever and wherever it’s needed. Using AI-as-a-Contributor can help to add an extra layer of support, which may result in minimized errors and achieving a higher standard of quality and compliance which eventually will lead to a better performance history and scorecard.

A Case for Evolution: Shipley Methodology

Enter the Shipley methodology, if you are familiar with it, you are likely to instantly understand and appreciate the potential of ChatGPT to streamline this endeavor. Not only can you augment team members, expertise and content you can also use ChatGPT to infuse warmth into this often rigid and complex process. Automation can provide a means to simplify specific aspects of the process without diluting the method’s thoroughness.

How badly have you wanted to evolve the process over the years? Wanted to come up with the next best thing, something that more accurately fits the nature of your business? Artificial Intelligence can open doors to creativity and flexibility within the confines of the traditionally stringent proposal structures. By reducing the time spent on routine tasks, teams have more time to focus on strategic elements such as capturing the client’s vision, articulating value propositions, and perfecting the proposal narrative. It’s about evolving the proposal process, leveraging AI not as a replacement, but as a supplement to your team’s effectiveness.

See it in action

I let ChatGPT review portions of this article before posting it. I originally wrote the sentence, Using AI as a tool, can help to add an extra layer of support, which may result in minimized errors and achieving a higher standard of quality and compliance which eventually will lead to a better performance history and scorecard. As would my review team of collaborators and contributors, ChatGPT provided the feedback that the sentence should be simplified, offering up a new suggestion, Using AI as a tool adds an extra layer of support, potentially minimizing errors, enhancing quality and compliance, and improving performance history and scorecards. This is one of the simplest ways that you can augment your proposal team’s productivity with AI tooling.

A Word of Caution

While AI holds immense potential, it comes with its unique set of risks. First, practical applications for it evolve several times a day, standards are not always readily understood and your own organization or your clients, may not have a set standard for using it yet. It’s always important to understand and avoid pitfalls such as plagiarism, copyright infringement, and tone consistency in a proposal. While AI can help with that it can also add unintended concerns. Youll want to be aware of these and learn to navigate them like a pro. Your team will want to consider adding rules, guidelines and strategies for when an AI language model will be used and how its work will be validated, just like with any other teammate or contributor. If you will be training it on your organization’s data, be sure to create guidelines for this as well.

• If you’re interested in learning more about the potential risks associated with including AI like ChatGPT into your proposal process, here is a good read from Trident Proposals: Why ChatGPT and AI Should Not Write Your Next Proposal

With AI like ChatGPT, proposal development may be transformed so it is more fluid, longer a painstaking process but an efficient and engaging experience. Decide for yourself, can you learn to thrive with AI as your fellow collaborator? Sign up for the upcoming training session to experience this firsthand and stay ahead in the game.

Ready, Set, Go – Add ChatGPT to the Proposal Workflow

In this ever-changing arena, it may be time to harness the power of AI to elevate your proposal development process. Implementing artificial intelligence into your proposal process presents both a challenge and an opportunity that your team can’t afford to miss. That’s why Im offering a special training specifically designed for proposal management teams to help you augment your teams’ creativity and keep the competition on their toes. This training is designed to help you to facilitate a responsible and effective incorporation of AI into your proposal process, so that can extend your toolkit however you see fit.

This workshop will guide you step-by-step on how to utilize ChatGPT as a tool in your proposal development arsenal. We’ll cover everything from a beginners standpoint so by the end you’ll be proficient in leveraging AI to elevate your proposals to the next level. Were also going to cover best practices for developing guidelines for the use of AI on your team. This course is perfect for full-scale teams as well as smaller teams and solopreneurs.

Ready to go? Register for the introduction session and embark on this journey to propose with me in 2023. We’re offering special pricing for those who register by Memorial Day.

Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to stay ahead of the curve.

In the world of tech, the concept of a “stack” refers to a set of software tools and frameworks that are used to develop an application or website. I’ve found this same concept to be true in consulting, marketing and now in creating. Yes, it can be applied to creativity, where a set of tools and resources can help individuals achieve their creative goals. As a creator, you can augment your creativity with your very own, “Creativity Stack.”

“Creativity Stack”

The Creativity Stack can vary depending on the type of creativity in your fingertips. Having a set of tools and resources that help enhance your creativity can significantly impact the quality and efficiency of your work. This is where the concept of a “Creativity Stack” comes into play. Depending on the type of creativity at hand, creators can identify and utilize the right tools to achieve their goals. For example, a graphic designer may rely on tools like Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, or Sketch, while a musician may require software like Logic Pro or Ableton Live, and we know that Project Managers breathe by their tools that connect Ganntt charts, schedules, and project tasks together. By identifying and using the right tools, creators can also enhance their creative output and improve the efficiency of their workflow.

In today’s digital age, the onset of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the concept of the “Creativity Stack”. The advent of AI-based tools has provided creators with an unprecedented level of flexibility, accuracy, and speed. For instance, natural language processing (NLP) models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 can assist writers with generating ideas, improving sentence structure, and even generating entire pieces of content. Similarly, generative art platforms like Dalle2, ArtBreeder or Deep Dream Generator use AI algorithms to create unique and captivating pieces of art. With AI-based tools becoming more accessible, creators can leverage these technologies to take their work to the next level…spurring that innovative spirit within and helping you get to a level you may not have ever dreamt about.

I reached out to start Augmenting my Creativity in ways that I honestly didn’t realize I needed to explore further. I’ve been known as far back as 2011 to have used facial recognition software to augment a character or two while streaming while gaming. Since the realization of the Metaverse, Technikole has donned her avatar form courtesy of the same technology which infused with Ready Player Me. But this week…I explored some more.

I tapped all the way in and came out the other end with a new intro for my show. Check out my toolkit that I used to create the Meta Mind Shift Show new intro. Watch the video, then come back and check out how I put AI to use:

Chatbots (LLMs)

I used these three chatbots to develop my announcer’s script. That is my method, I rarely use just one because they have different flavors and I’m a girl who likes options:

• OpenAI ChatGPT: A large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI.

• Google Bard: A large language model from Google AI, trained on a massive dataset of text and code.

• Rix AI is an AI chatbot designed to assist developers with a range of tasks, including generating, documenting, testing, and debugging code, as well as answering questions about code.

That Voice

• Eleven Labs: A software company that uses artificial intelligence to create natural-sounding speech.

• D-ID: A company that develops deep learning-based solutions for image and video forensics.

Unlike other parts of this, I knew exactly what I wanted for the voice. I have a thing for dudes with accents and thanks to Eleven Labs it worked out perfectly and landed their service in my long-term must-have bag. Their free tier is amazing and absolutely worth the upgrade to pro for $5 a month. If you join within a reasonable time of me writing this you’ll also get a lucrative discount for your first month (mine was $1!!! for 30K credits in addition to the 10K on the free tier.)

I meshed the voice that was created with an avatar for use in the ultimate video. Their selection is diverse with more seasoning than some of the other similar platforms. If you just want an avatar they have a great selection. If you already have an avatar they allow you to import your own and animate it to look as if it’s talking. You can even generate avatars and scripts right there on the platform. I’m picky so I went another route but their animation functionality is top-notch and easy to use.

Graphics and Presentation

I reached out to good ol’ faithful for the presentation and graphics. Though I did start out creating the avatar in D-iD, I wasn’t quite getting what I wanted. Then I had an idea to create a Michael Ealy-esk newscaster for the show, so I did. Within 30 minutes I had him thanks to Blue Willow. The ability to freely iterate without worrying about costs is EXTREMELY helpful when you don’t know what you want exactly. Also shots out to ChatGPT for this because I wasn’t getting it right and ended up asked for the right prompt for Stable Diffusion (one of its AI Models) and this got me going down the right path. One of the new features on Blue Willow that totally killed it was “outpainting”, the ability to pan and continue generation. My original image did not cut off his hair at the time of generation. You can see it in it the middle of the shot below. I used outpainting to provide new versions of the top portion of the image….and wha-lah!

In comes Canva. To just say its a handy tool, doesn’t do it service. If you aren’t using it for SOMETHING, you should be. I am a Maestro, a Conductor of Creativity on the Canva platform, which ultimately means I use it…a lot. I’ve created everything. For this, I used it as a landing pad for all of my elements in the video. It’s where the construction happened, the combination of components and content. Background removal, word placement, animated robot – all of it, was done on Canva. Background removal is a gem for pro users. I use it literally every day.

• Blue Willow: Blue Willow is a generative art platform that allows users to create AI-generated art.

• Canva: A graphic design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, and more.

• Constant Contact: Constant Contact is a marketing platform that can help creators with email marketing and social media marketing. It offers a variety of templates and tools for creating and managing campaigns. This tool is great for marketers and small business owners. [Get a 60-day trial and 30% off!]

NEXT UP

This was a fun project that gave me the results I wanted. The Creativity Stack incorporating AI, is diverse and can include a variety of tools and resources depending on the type of creativity you are seeking to enhance. By using these tools, creators can save time and energy while still achieving their creative goals. Whether you’re a writer, musician, marketer, or filmmaker, there is a Creativity Stack out there for you so tap in!

Looking for personalized guidance or support in implementing the strategies discussed in this blog? Look no further! Contact me for consulting services tailored to your specific needs and goals. I’m here to help you succeed.

Tags:

Creativity Stack, AI-based tools, creative workflow, productivity, efficiency, voiceover, avatar creation, graphic design, social media marketing, email marketing, inspiration, new ideas, problem-solving, innovation, Metaverse