How AI Tools Can Transform Proposal Management Now

By Brenda Crist, Vice President at Lohfeld Consulting Group, MPA, CPP APMP Fellow and Louise Fisher, Senior Consultant and Trainer, Lohfeld Consulting, CF APMP

AI tools are transforming how proposal managers plan, write, review, and deliver proposals. Proposal managers lead complex coordination efforts by balancing schedules, compliance, writing, reviews, production, and presentations under unrelenting deadlines. By integrating AI tools into daily workflows, proposal teams can automate repetitive tasks, cut hours of manual effort, reduce stress, and elevate quality. The result is more time for strategy, storytelling, and building solutions that win contracts.

Rationale for the Use of AI Tools

At the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) Winning AI25 conference, attendees observed that the use of AI tools has become ubiquitous, with many professionals using multiple platforms to complete their work. To support this growing need, we compiled a list of over 70 AI tools for proposal managers to increase efficiency and productivity. Many of these tools can perform more than one of the 12 tasks listed below. Additionally, tools are emerging at an unprecedented pace, so we will regularly update this blog to showcase the latest tools shaping proposal management.

Task #1: Scheduling and Meeting Management

To develop and manage proposal schedules and meetings, use these AI tools to coordinate, eliminate double-booking, and ensure everyone stays aligned.

• Calendly: Coordinates availability across teams and clients, simplifying scheduling.
• Clockwise: Uses AI to minimize meeting conflicts and maximize focus time.
• Copilot: Automates scheduling, meeting summaries, and task tracking within Teams and Outlook.
• Fireflies.ai: Provides detailed notes, action items, and customized summaries after every meeting.
• Otter.ai: Records and summarizes team discussions, lists action items, and creates meeting summaries.

Task #2: Email Management

Reduce inbox clutter, accelerate response time, and ensure critical proposal communications never slip through the cracks.

• Clippit AI: Helps compose polished and professional emails given basic drafts.
• Copilot: Summarizes email threads, drafts replies, and flags action items.
• Friday: Helps write email replies, checks for grammar and spelling issues, tracks when emails are read, and syncs meetings across calendars.
• MailMaestro: Writes professional, personalized emails, detects action items and alerts you to deadlines, and tags emails by priority level.
• Shortwave: Organizes and prioritizes your inbox, filters emails, writes professional emails, provides AI tools to search and find answers, and assists with scheduling.
• Superhuman Mail: Organizes your inbox, ensuring you never drop the ball; helps draft and send emails on your behalf.

Task #3: Knowledge and Content Management

Enabling users to build content and knowledge repositories, these AI tools empower proposal managers to find and reuse content, driving consistency and speed. Most of these tools provide the full range of functions listed in Tasks 3-7.

• Inventive: Provides a centralized hub for all knowledge sources; integrates with internal data systems and enables users to upload RFP documents.
• Awarded.AI by Procurement Sciences: Centralizes knowledge, including past performance data, resumes, and proposal libraries for quick reference and reuse.
• Loopio: Provides a central knowledge management repository, supports team collaboration across projects, and automates proposal development.
• QorusDocs: Helps teams store, organize, and retrieve content from a single location, supporting consistency, reuse, and faster assembly.
• Qvidian by Upland: Provides a central content library where teams store and manage approved content, ensuring consistency, version control, and easy reuse.
• Responsive: Delivers a centralized knowledge hub where teams can quickly access approved content, letting AI-powered search and governance keep responses accurate and up to date.
• Rohan by Rohirrim: Uses internal data to automate proposal creation; streamlines document production and knowledge reuse.

Task #4: Compliance Management

Most AI tools for proposals offer a compliance matrix-building option, including those listed in Task #3, that parse the RFP for requirements and generate a preliminary compliance matrix. It is the responsibility of the proposal manager to review and verify an AI-generated compliance matrix.

• 123PAS: Builds compliance matrices from RFP documents and provides a non-compliance checker to address issues.
• Conveyor: Shreds your RFP and develops a requirements list that you can convert into a compliance matrix.
• DeepRFP: Extracts information from RFP documents and builds a compliance matrix. GovDash: Builds compliance matrices from RFP documents and then maps those requirements directly to your proposal content.
• Unanet ProposalAI: Enables “RFP shredding,” compliance matrix creation, and draft generation for your proposal.
• VisibleThread: Generates a compliance matrix by analyzing the RFP, automatically extracting key requirements, and building a clear traceability map from each RFP requirement to a corresponding response.

Task #5: Outline and Proposal Development

With these AI tools, proposal teams get started faster and stay organized, eliminating the blank-page problem and ensuring a compliant structure from day one.

• ChatGPT: Processes prompts to generate proposal outlines from compliance matrices.
• Ensis: Produces outlines and requirements lists using multiple RFP documents to ensure compliance.
• GovWin by Deltek: Uses request for proposal (RFP) documents in your pipeline to draft a proposal outline automatically.
• Claude: Analyzes RFP documents and organizes content into logical sections; uses natural language understanding to suggest headings and map responses.
• Gemini: Analyzes the RFP, extracts key requirements, and organizes them into a structured proposal requirements matrix. It can map each requirement to the appropriate section, owner, and response status.
• Perplexity: Creates a proposal compliance matrix by extracting each RFP requirement and mapping it to the corresponding section in the proposal.

Task #6: Proposal Writing and Editing

These AI tools empower teams to write clearly, confidently, and consistently while maintaining compliance and readability standards.

• Acrolinx: Enforces organizational style, tone, and compliance standards and provides suggestions for writing improvements.
• AutogenAI: Accelerates proposal writing by using generative AI trained on past bids and corporate content to draft tailored responses.
• Copilot: Suggests rewrites, summaries, and improvements directly in Microsoft Word.
• Grammarly: Offers grammar, tone, and clarity corrections to enhance readability.
• PerfectIt: Identifies consistency mistakes, editorial issues, and typos, and enforces style preferences.
• pWin.ai: Helps create prompts to build high-quality content using RFP documents. Infused with Shipley’s best practices for proposal development and writing.
• Vultron: Helps generate proposal drafts, check compliance, and edit documents in Microsoft Word, among other capabilities.

Task #7: Review Management

Strengthen proposal quality by providing objective feedback and reducing costly rewrite cycles using these AI tools.

• Altura: Enables reviewers to write, review, and comment on proposal text concurrently.  
• Awarded.AI by Procurement Sciences: Provides compliance reviews based on your custom evaluation criteria.
• LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini): Analyze sections for alignment, structure, and readability.
• Loopio: Automates RFP/RFI response workflows with an AI library and review-tracking, enabling smarter proposal review cycles.
• Inventive: Verifies that the proposal meets the RFP requirements, is customer-focused, and is substantiated.

Task #8: Graphics, Videos, and Desktop Publishing

Design visually appealing, professional graphics, videos, and presentations that emphasize strengths and differentiate proposals with these AI tools—many of which are free or offer premium plans.

• Adobe Firefly: Generates visuals and illustrations through text prompts.
• Canva: Produces images using AI prompts that you can continually refine.
• DALL·E: Generates original images for cover art and conceptual graphics.
• DeepBrain AI: Helps create videos from text quickly.
• Microsoft Designer (In CoPilot and Word): Enables you to create images, icons, wallpaper, banners, backgrounds, avatars, emojis, and more to illustrate your proposal or presentation.
• Midjourney: Create images and videos with this free AI art generator. Use a Google, Factor, or Discord account to sign in.
• Rogue: Automates formatting, templates, and layout consistency across large documents.
• Synthesia: Turns text into videos with AI avatars for presentations.
• Visme: Create graphics, infographics, slides, and templates.

Task #9: Presentation Management

These AI tools enable proposal teams to create professional, persuasive presentations.

• Beautiful.ai: Creates auto-formatted slides and proposal diagrams.
• Plus: Integrates with PowerPoint and Google Slides to generate presentations using AI prompts that you can continually refine using custom instructions.
• PopAi: Enables you to paste existing content into a presentation template or interact with it to build and refine a presentation from scratch.
• Presentations.AI: Drafts complete slide decks from documents or scripts.
• Slidesgo: Offers AI-recommended templates customized for proposal presentations, as well as lesson plans, quiz-making tools, and icebreaker tools.
• Text to Speech by ElevenLabs: Turns your script into an AI voice.

Task #10: Oral Proposal Preparation

Streamline final production, helping proposal teams deliver consistent, polished, and persuasive oral presentations with these tools.

• Orai: Helps analyze presentation pacing and tone and collects instant feedback.
• PitchPerfect AI: Provides realistic scenarios that simulate interaction with customers and provides instant feedback on your pitch, pacing, and delivery.
• VirtualSpeech: Provides 30 classes to train staff in soft skills, including public speaking, difficult conversations, interviews, and negotiations. Provides immediate feedback on performance.
• Yoodli: Provides interactive role-playing scenarios for speakers to practice their presentations.
• Verble: Provides an AI speech-writing assistant to help users master verbal persuasion and storytelling and offers coaching insights to help improve your presentation.
• PromptSmart: Presents a teleprompter for speakers. Imports scripts, scrolls as you speak, and syncs across devices.

Task #11: AI Workflow Automation

Orchestrate seamless task automation, connecting content management, compliance, and communication systems for maximum efficiency.

• Integrately: Links apps like SharePoint, Teams, and Salesforce to automate workflows.
• Make: Uses a no-code solution to build visual representations of solutions.
• monday.com: Tracks milestones and automates assignments via AI triggers; enables you to automate dashboards, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and forms.
• n8n: Enables low-code workflow automation and is customizable with Java or Python; it helps users automate a process, pause, insert human intervention, and resume.
• Pitch: Converts proposals into polished decks for customer briefings.
• Trello: Turns emails into to-do lists and creates task boards to monitor progress.
• Wrike: Enhances team collaboration with features such as interactive Gantt charts, customizable Kanban boards, and dynamic request forms.
• Zapier: Connects apps to automate data movement and notification workflows.

Task #12: AI Detectors

AI text detectors (often called AI content detectors or AI language model detectors) identify whether text was generated by large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini. These tools determine whether the text is AI-generated or human-written; however, no detector is 100% reliable. Accuracy drops when:

• The AI text is heavily edited or mixed with human writing.
• The sample is short (under ~150 words).
• Models evolve faster than detectors update.

Most tools provide probability scores rather than definitive judgments.

• GPTZero: One of the earliest and most cited detectors for educational and professional use, it features sentence-level AI probability, overall “perplexity” and “burstiness” scores, and API access.
• Copyleaks: Integrates plagiarism scanning with AI text detection and supports multiple LLMs and languages.
• TextGuard: Helps users verify text originality and enhance uniqueness through paraphrasing without losing the original meaning.
• Originality.ai: Tracks AI usage and plagiarism simultaneously.
• Phrasly: Helps detect the robotic elements of AI writing and human touch.
• Rewritely: Humanizes your AI-written material to help evade AI detectors.

The Future of Proposal Management with AI Tools

The proposal industry is being reshaped by intelligent automation—the right AI tools help proposal managers reclaim time for strategic work. At Lohfeld Consulting Group, we teach proposal professionals how to blend automation with human insight through our Generative AI for Proposal Professionals, Modern Proposal Writing, and Proposal Management classes. These classes show how to use AI tools responsibly to produce compliant, compelling, and high-scoring proposals. We also provide consultants trained in AI/Generative AI tools and methods to help you create your next proposal. If you are ready to transform your proposal process with AI, contact us today.

Relevant Information

• Automated Tools Powering Growth Beyond AI Now

• How to Describe Innovation in Proposals

• Just How Good is Generative Artificial Intelligence in Helping with Proposals?

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By Brenda Crist, Vice President at Lohfeld Consulting Group, MPA, CPP APMP Fellow, and
By Louise Fisher, Senior Consultant and Trainer, Lohfeld Consulting, CF 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).