Why GenAI Needs Guidance: Like Managing a New Intern

A US sporting goods company had a global intern program, which sent the brightest young minds to learn about business around the world. One intern, Phil, was sent to the UK subsidiary in Dundee, Scotland. After getting oriented, Phil sat in on his first staff meeting—a monthly status review. About an hour in, the managing director said, “OK, mates, let’s take 10.” Young Phil, noting that everyone had been drinking tea during the meeting, triumphantly proclaimed, “Tea time!” “No, lad, coffee break,” the leader replied. “Tee time means we hit the links at St. Andrew’s!”

GenAI and Intern Analogy Explained

So, why is this joke in a column about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)? Well, GenAI is the smartest intern you know. It has an impressive breadth of knowledge, but like an intern, it often lacks the practical experience and contextual awareness needed to apply this knowledge effectively. Failure to understand how to get started with GenAI can lead to frustration and underutilization of a very capable resource.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, GenAI is often considered to streamline processes, such as proposal development. The idea of allowing it to ingest the RFP and some of your corporate data and then spit out a finished proposal is alluring but unrealistic at this time. Much like a new intern, GenAI requires careful management and guidance to ensure its outputs are accurate and relevant. So, treating GenAI like an intern is a great way to gain some benefit from this amazing technology while preparing for more mature proposal uses of the tool.

GenAI and Intern Challenges

There are three big challenges both interns and GenAI share:

• GenAI’s lack of contextual awareness means that it does not actually know your business. Rather, it has lots of potential facts at its fingertips, and it will put them together in a way that makes sense to it based on the instructions you provided.
• Its overconfidence can imply a level of certainty that isn’t warranted for the situation. Sometimes, it’s difficult to get it to change direction after it starts down a line of reasoning. I’ve been in situations where GenAI failed to follow my directions, even acknowledging that it did not do a task correctly and remarking on what it should have done, but it still could not do the right thing.
• Of course, it has little emotional intelligence (EI), especially with respect to your business norms. It doesn’t know the nuances of your or your customers’ organizations, so it cannot inject these matters into its analysis in a nuanced, compelling way.

Harnessing GenAI Capabilities

So, how can we effectively manage GenAI to harness its potential while mitigating these challenges? Here are four things you can do to get started with GenAI on a project. These four points are a balancing act—to get the most out of new employees or interns, we must balance our tendency to want to give them too much with our fear that they will take up too much of our time.

• Give it tasks suited to its strengths
• Scope the work to maximize your available time
• Give clear instructions
• Encourage collaboration between humans and GenAI

When it comes to GenAI, it’s hard to give one-size-fits-all suggestions, which is why you must find a balance among these four parameters. Starting with our first bullet, GenAI is suited to analytical tasks, particularly where the relationship between words and/or subjects is key. It’s great at summarizing, creating comparisons, identifying pattern-based relationships, etc. However, it doesn’t know everything. GenAI makes comparisons against the norms from its training, assuming they are valid unless you tell it otherwise. This is where that lack of contextual knowledge or EI shows up. The effect can be offset by giving clear instructions. However, writing clear instructions requires time—you have to figure out what you and the GenAI are each assuming and provide definitive guidance.

How GenAI Can Become Your Multi-Purpose Tool

If you are new to GenAI, you might think you are starting with a blank sheet of paper because you will have few, if any, canned prompt chains, engineered prompts, or bots to help you bring that information quickly and efficiently into the equation. But you might have more tools than you think. Do you have a standard template for providing upper management with an RFP summary? Providing GenAI with the template, instructions for populating the template, and guidance on where to find the data can speed up the process of developing a prompt workflow for an AI-generated summary. This doesn’t mean you can skip reading the RFP, but it will save you time writing about it. By reading it yourself, you can evaluate GenAI’s summary. You might find places where it made mistakes due to a lack of EI around the customer. You might also find you missed something in your reading. But, if it generally took you a couple hours to make a summary after reading the RFP, you’ll probably save yourself half or more of that time.

As you continue to use GenAI, keep in mind the scope/time dimension. When you start working with GenAI in a new area, it’s easy to start exploring ideas and trying to get it to do more complex chores. Just remember that if you are working on a deadline, don’t put too much focus on getting GenAI to do something ambitious and lose track of your deadline-driven responsibilities. Working with GenAI, you will begin to discover where analytical techniques end and where judgmental operations begin. GenAI is great at the former but cannot do the latter. So, ensure you allocate your time wisely. Use GenAI to handle data-heavy tasks while reserving judgment and critical thinking tasks for yourself—areas where human insight is indispensable. This will help you maintain control over your project’s direction and deadlines.

Conclusion

Just as we wouldn’t expect a new intern to navigate the complexities of a proposal on their own, we shouldn’t rely solely on GenAI to do it without providing the necessary guidance and oversight. By understanding and adapting to its limitations, we can prevent missteps and ensure that GenAI contributes positively to our proposal efforts.

GenAI is like the smartest intern you know—full of potential but needing guidance. By providing clear instructions, incorporating human oversight, and fostering collaboration, we can harness the power of GenAI to enhance our proposal process and achieve better outcomes. As we continue to explore the possibilities of this technology, let’s embrace its strengths while remaining mindful of its limitations, ensuring that it serves as a valuable partner in our proposal development efforts.

If you would like to learn more about GenAI, consider taking one of Lohfeld Consulting’s Generative AI for Proposal Professionals classes or enrolling in our AI Proposal Development program. If you want to purchase a GenAI platform tailored to the bid and proposal industry, click here for a demo of the Procurement Sciences platform.

Relevant Content

• The Impact of Generative AI on Cost Savings in Bids and Proposals
• 100 Tips for Improving Proposal Writing Using Generative AI
• Generative AI for Proposal Development: Writing the Proposal of the Future | YouTube

By Dwayne Baptist, Vice President and Instructor at Lohfeld Consulting Group, PMP, APMP

Lohfeld Consulting Group has proven results specializing in helping companies create winning captures and proposals. As the premier capture and proposal services consulting firm focused exclusively on government markets, we provide expert assistance to government contractors in Capture Planning and Strategy, Proposal Management and Writing, Capture and Proposal Process and Infrastructure, and Training. In the last 3 years, we’ve supported over 550 proposals winning more than $170B for our clients—including the Top 10 government contractors. Lohfeld Consulting Group is your “go-to” capture and proposal source! Start winning by contacting us at www.lohfeldconsulting.com and join us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube^(TM).