Writing proposals is one of the toughest parts of the thought-leadership business model.
You’ve listened to your client, taken notes, and uncovered their pain points. Now you have to translate that into something clear, actionable, and persuasive—a proposal that not only offers solutions but also shows you understand them.
The truth is, great proposals take time. They require a balance between human warmth and strategic precision. And for thought leaders juggling deadlines and big ideas, that can feel overwhelming.
This is where AI can help.
Recently, I worked on a proposal for a client—I’ll call him Bill—whose engineering firm was struggling with internal alignment and external messaging. Over the course of our conversation, Bill described a mix of challenges: team friction, unclear messaging, and pressure to deliver on big initiatives.
When it came time to write the proposal, I leaned on AI for the heavy lifting—not to replace my work, but to enhance it where it mattered most. Here’s how AI helped me save time, think strategically, and keep the human touch front and center.
Finding The Themes That Matter
When Bill and I finished our conversation, I had a detailed transcript full of insight: his teams weren’t aligned, his sales team and his design team saw their clients differently, and he needed actionable messaging for a product launch and a major client announcement.
Sifting through all this to find the key points could have taken hours. Instead, I fed the transcript into AI and asked it to pull out recurring themes.
The AI flagged phrases Bill repeated—like “get people telling the same story” and “find out what resonates most”—and surfaced the disconnect between his teams as a central issue. It also helped me see where his long-term cultural challenges intersected with his short-term messaging needs.
This gave me a roadmap. By focusing on these themes, I could write a proposal that spoke directly to Bill’s pain points and positioned messaging as the solution.
Shaping The Client’s Words Into A Narrative
The next challenge was to frame Bill’s challenges as a solvable problem. To do this, I needed to connect what he told me about his team’s struggles to a clear, actionable solution.
Here’s where AI surprised me. I asked it to organize the transcript into sections based on the questions I had asked Bill. The AI grouped related ideas together, which helped me see the flow of our conversation in a new light.
For example, it linked Bill’s discussion of team misalignment with his concerns about delivering a unified narrative for their upcoming product launch. That connection wasn’t obvious to me at first, but seeing it laid out gave me the insight I needed to craft the proposal’s opening.
Saving Time On Repetition
Proposals often require summarizing what you’ve heard—reflecting back the client’s challenges to show you understand them. This can be time-consuming, especially when you’re trying to rephrase the client’s words in a way that feels sharp and professional.
AI helped here, too. I asked it to summarize specific sections of the transcript, then used those summaries as starting points. For example, Bill described friction between his teams in several places, each time with slightly different language. The AI brought those fragments together into a concise summary I could refine further.
This step saved me time and energy, letting me focus on crafting the proposal’s more creative elements instead of getting bogged down in repetition.
Keeping The Human Touch
Here’s the thing: AI didn’t write the proposal. It didn’t come up with the structure, the solutions, or the language that resonated with Bill’s needs.
That was my job.
AI handled the mechanical tasks—sorting themes, summarizing conversations, and highlighting patterns. But the heart of the proposal came from me:
- I listened deeply to Bill’s challenges.
- I reframed messaging as the neutral ground his teams needed to align.
- I crafted the structure, deliverables, and tone to match his immediate goals and long-term vision.
Proposals can’t feel cold or transactional. They have to connect with your client on a human level. They have to show empathy.
Balancing AI With Humanity
AI is an amazing tool, but it works best when paired with your creativity and intuition. If you’re writing proposals, here’s how to strike the right balance:
- Use AI for analysis, not creativity: Let it handle the time-consuming work of sorting, summarizing, and finding patterns. Use your own judgment to shape those insights into a narrative.
- Keep your client’s voice in focus: AI can highlight recurring phrases or themes, but you have to decide which ones matter most.
- Don’t let AI replace the human touch: Empathy, intuition, and creative framing are what make proposals resonate. That’s something only you can provide.
What This Means for Thought Leaders
Great proposals aren’t just about pitching solutions. They’re about showing your clients that you’ve heard them, understood their challenges, and can deliver something meaningful.
AI can help you get there faster. It can organize your thoughts, surface connections you might have missed, and free up time for the creative work only you can do.
But the heart of a strong proposal? That’s still up to you.