It’s fair to say that AI has become the most talked about technology. Whether the discussion is about how AI affects businesses, concerns over replacing jobs, or AI’s impact on social media, everyone everywhere is talking about AI and where it will take us in the future.
To discuss these topics, Responsive’s CEO and Co-Founder Ganesh Shankar recently joined a CEO panel hosted by the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) as a part of the Winning AI24 Online Conference.
During the panel, industry CEOs and experts shared their insights and learnings from the past year to help break down the emerging complex topics surrounding AI, explore the latest applications of AI, and discuss what AI trends and forecasts mean for the world around us.
Session highlights include:
- Concerns about AI adoption and replacing humans
- Understanding AI’s role in enhancing proposal content
- Ethical considerations to keep in mind when using AI
- What to consider when selecting proposal software
Keep reading to see Shankar’s thoughts on each of the topics from this CEO panel.
Note: The questions from David Gray, Bid Excellence Director at Mitie and Board Chair at APMP, and answers from Ganesh Shankar were edited for brevity and clarity.
Concerns about AI adoption and replacing humans
David Gray: There’s a common misconception that AI adoption may ultimately replace humans. Coming from an association that is embodied by members across the profession, it’s always an element of some concern.
What strategies can organizations adopt to ensure that their own adoption of AI is there to enhance productivity, innovation, and efficiency, rather than replacing humans in that process?
Ganesh Shankar: I truly believe this generation has seen this kind of transformation already. In the 2000s we saw the emergence of mobile technologies. That was followed by the cloud revolution. Suddenly, the cloud was everywhere, and people thought it was going to change everything. Over time, people understood that these technologies were not going to replace them.
AI is more of a collaborator. It is more of an augmentation of what we are doing today.
We understand that now. But one lead difference I will say, compared to the mobile revolution and cloud revolution, the AI revolution is much, much faster than the other revolutions.
So, it is not giving us a lot of time to comprehend what is happening. The mobile revolution was a lot easier for us to process. Even the cloud revolution was a little faster than mobile, and I think AI is even faster. So I do think people are still processing what is happening, but we are all already seeing early indicators.
AI is more of an augmentation. It’s a collaborative tool, not a replacement for humans.
Where I’ve seen some of our advanced customers leveraging AI is some of the time-consuming tasks and repetitive tasks, such as the very early stages of creating first drafts. That’s where we have started noticing AI is being highly leveraged.
But, at the end of the day, I do think there is an important element of human review processes that is still needed. It is not a replacement. It is an augmentation. That’s how I see it.
Understanding AI’s role in enhancing proposal content
David Gray: Once you’re using AI, what specific role can these AI tools play in enhancing the quality and the relevance of proposal content, particularly in very competitive environments?
Ganesh Shankar: So taking a step back, there are technologies today available on the cloud where you can still maintain the ownership of the content. If you put information in ChatGPT or any other platform that you don’t have control over, or your IT domain doesn’t have control, that becomes the feeding content for those training models.
But for our Responsive model, customer data never goes out of their instance.
I think we are at a point where we can comfortably say unless you put your information into a third-party tool, there are guardrails today for our customers to keep their data within their own instances and technologies.
To answer the question, where are we seeing the utilization of these technologies?
There are a few immediate use cases. The first is that our customers are using our AI applications to write initial drafts.
The second one is customizing or summarizing a huge pile of information. I don’t have the time to go through this whole thing. I want to summarize it. We have seen customers summarize the content en masse.
Imagine a scenario where you have a 200-page PDF document that you have to go through to understand the requirements, when it’s due, etc. This is now being automated. It helps us to be much more strategic than going through line by line. Instead, AI can summarize the document, and humans can take that summary and process it. Of course, you still need to put it all through the review process.
The third is the proofreading and editing process for grammatical styles and consistency. When we write content, we might have a different style. If your organization wants to provide consistent messaging, you can leverage AI for summarization, proofreading, and consistency.
Ethical considerations to keep in mind when using AI
David Gray: What are some of the ethical considerations we need to think about when we’re implementing AI in proposal development, especially if we’re a member in some of those particularly sensitive sectors?
Ganesh Shankar: When talking about ethical considerations, I do think there are a few points that we need to be very careful about when we implement AI.
There are four considerations to keep in mind:
- Data privacy and security
- Bias and fairness
- Intellectual property
- Compliance
Information protection is super important. There’s a chance that if you’re leveraging AI, it could go out the door without human review.
The second important point I would say is bias and fairness. We have to prevent AI from perpetuating or amplifying any biases in proposal content.
Intellectual property is another area where it’s important to address concerns about ownership. The totality of AI-generated content is another consideration when you’re talking about not letting AI hallucinate something and create intellectual property issues.
And finally, I would also add compliance, ensuring AI adheres to the sector-specific regulation and ethical guidelines. Sometimes AI can be generic. It may not adhere to something specific like HIPAA for healthcare. It may not follow the established compliance.
Taking these into consideration can help prevent liabilities for their employer or their companies.
What to consider when selecting proposal software
David Gray: What kind of criteria should organizations consider when they select an AI-driven proposal management tool or software to help us with our proposals? Give us some examples you would encourage buyers to think about that are different from traditional software.
Ganesh Shankar: The most important thing is that it’s not a top-down approach. Don’t pick a solution, pick a software and go with it.
When doing so, there are four important considerations:
- Relevance
- Integration
- User Interface
- Scalability
The first thing is identifying the problem you’re trying to solve. Then, evaluate the AI capabilities. Is the functionality that these companies offer relevant for my space?
There’s a lot of noise around us today. In fact, software companies are under tremendous pressure. If you don’t have an AI story today, you are considered legacy. People put you on the back burner. Your competition puts you on the back burner.
There is so much noise and so much clutter in the market. There’s always a new shiny thing that is available in the market. But what is most important? What are the most critical things that demand AI?
Is AI super important? How do we make sure we have a proper workflow? How do we make sure we have technology that helps me to draft first content?
Sometimes when we enter the market, we get unrealistic expectations and promises from software providers. I’m a software provider, and I can acknowledge this happens sometimes. When I evaluate technologies today for Responsive, the first question I ask my team is, “What are the true use cases that we are trying to solve?”
Just because some fancy item is there, we can’t just go and implement it. What are the few use cases that we are trying to solve? What are we trying to achieve? You need to be educated. What are the things that you have not anticipated that can be solved by AI? But, the fundamental core use cases need to be started by you.
The second consideration is that technologies cannot operate in a siloed fashion. It has to integrate with your existing ecosystem because the enterprise content is already distributed across many different systems, and now you’re adding another technology.
You’re asking another technology to hold this information. You’re adding more problems to the problem already there. So you have to make sure the new technology is interoperable and integrated with the existing technology ecosystem you have.
Another thing I would say is the user interface. Gone are those days when we turned on our cell phones and used something like Facebook without training. And when you are at work, you’re using dozens of other enterprise software. You can’t just switch software now and expect people to understand how it works instantly. It’s our responsibility to help people understand how to use these new AI technologies.
As software providers, we need to make sure it’s usable. You don’t need a lot of training. It’s not rocket science. The same person learning how to use B2C applications in the early 2000s for the first time is now learning how to use these new B2B technologies.
However, the wall separating B2C and B2B technologies has almost vanished today. There is no real difference between these platforms for most users. So, the user interface is super important, and so is making sure the AI capabilities are relevant for you.
I would say the fourth point is scalability. Your company, and especially aspiring companies, don’t stop. The technology that you are implementing should be scaling with you.
Final thoughts
AI has become the single most transformative business tool that industry leaders have implemented in decades. The most successful organizations have already begun leveraging AI to improve operational efficiency and drive growth and revenue.
Interested in learning more about AI’s transformative role? Download a free copy of The 2024 State of Strategic Response Management Report to learn how leading organizations are driving greater revenue by investing in platform-level capabilities that go beyond GenAI and apply to more than just writing responses.
