AI ventures into grantmaking — and proposal writing may get a lot easier

Artificial intelligence could change nearly everything about how grant proposals are understood, written, and won. At least, that’s the hope of the team behind Grant Assistant, an AI platform launched today by two former chiefs of staff at USAID. “This is a technology that has tremendous potential to democratize development, expand the partnerbase of donors like USAID, and empower local organizations,” said William Steiger, who served as chief of staff at USAID during the Trump administration, and now is an adviser to Grant Assistant and a member of the company’s board. The platform — which can help organizations find, write, and refine proposals through a custom language learning model — comes a year after its now-chief executive officer, Mustafa Hasnain, thought up the concept with Sean Carroll, the former chief of staff at USAID under the Obama administration. But the problem Grant Assistant is trying to solve, both Steiger and Carroll said, has been around for decades: Requests for proposals are often complicated, lengthy, and swimming in development jargon, blocking large and small organizations from accessing available funds. For years, it’s been something USAID and the U.S. government have been trying to change — but for many, that change hasn’t happened fast enough. For Steiger, what first came to mind was St. Luke Catholic Hospital. He came across the organization, which was run by a group of Indian nuns in Ethiopia while leading programs at Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon, an international organization focused on breast and cervical cancer. “They were an incredibly cost-effective, cost-efficient organization running on a shoestring,” Steiger told Devex. “And they had spent years battling the complexities of trying to get funding from the U.S. government without success.” The proposal process, Steiger said, was part of the problem — one that affected not just St. Luke, but many other organizations with neither the time nor staff to undertake mammoth proposal processes. Today, tackling that problem has never been more important, both former chiefs of staff said, especially given USAID’s lofty localization aims. “I think if tools like [Grant Assistant] aren’t available and used, we’re just going to keep puttering along, where we’re not really connecting the dots or figuring out how to put the best, most relevant ideas into action,” said Carroll, who now runs international aid organization Anera and serves as the chair of Grant Assistant. “I see this as a huge help to lower the barriers of entry, increase productivity, and increase compliance.” After testing the platform with some of USAID’s largest implementers, such as Catholic Relief Services, Creative, and Jhpiego, Grant Assistant has adapted, adjusted, and grown to something completely new for the development world: A tool that can write grants, provide feedback, and help organizations build proposals with targeted AI guidance. After a user uploads documents onto the platform — like past proposals, organizational details, and information on particular programs — Grant Assistant can synthesize how an agency might best respond to a request for proposals, and write those responses accordingly. It can check and change the proposal’s tone of voice. And, it can ensure the proposal isn’t leaving anything out, pointing out areas where an organization can strengthen or modify its response. It draws its answers from whatever documents the user submits, and though it spits out its answers in English, it can translate those documents from 42 different languages, Hasnain said. Importantly, the tool can also summarize requests for proposals and turn them into digestible one-pagers — helping organizations understand if they can, or should, apply for the grant in the first place. But despite the ease it creates, Hasnain said Grant Assistant is far from a robot that will write grants on its own. It requires human decision-making, feedback, and collaboration to make the proposal come to life. “We’ve been very thoughtful with how we’ve designed the tool, as it very clearly takes you through the whole journey of designing with your teams, ideating with your teams, and putting a good, comprehensive design together,” Hasnain said. TechChange, a social enterprise focused on digital education, tried Grant Assistant while it was in its beta phase, a part of a product’s lifecycle where it’s tested with real users before its official release. They used the platform to apply for a United Nations grant, chief executive officer Nick Martin told Devex — and he estimated the tool cut down their writing time by around 30%. “Having been in this sector for a long time, I’m somewhat jaded about how outrageously crazy some of these RFP [request for proposal] processes have become, and how time-consuming and burdensome it is,” said Martin, who invested in Grant Assistant after using the platform. “With all this talk about localization that everybody from Samantha Power all the way down has been championing — you can’t just overnight announce those things and then not change the RFP process.” Tools such as Grant Assistant, Martin said, can change that, especially when it comes to the complexities, checkboxes, and requirements needed to apply for the world’s biggest grant opportunities. “We want to level the playing field by giving local organizations an opportunity to compete against larger ones. And if you don’t have the people, you have to rely on some of these tools,” Martin said. “I don’t know how that’s not a win for localization.” But still, Grant Assistant doesn’t break down all local organizations’ barriers to entry: The cost of using the tool can be as high as $150,000 a year for a billion-dollar organization. Though the platform’s cost is on a sliding scale, Hasnain said a $10 million organization would still pay around $15,000 annually for the platform. For smaller, local organizations, the team didn’t give an exact dollar amount, though Hasnain said the company was “committed to ensuring that Grant Assistant fulfills its potential to help level the playing field for small and local organizations.” “We are currently working on both pricing structures and distribution deals to ensure those vital organizations have access to the tool at an affordable price,” said Hasnain. Though Grant Assistant launched today, the team hasn’t finished thinking about how AI can hit the grantmaking space. When asked about whether the tool can be adapted for reporting on those grants — or, on the donor side, reviewing the reports and proposals themselves — Hasnain laughed. “That’ll be coming up next,” he told Devex. “But it’s something that’s on our minds.”