One of the things I have started to notice, especially in the last few weeks, is that agents have started to penetrate more and more of the business world. In grant consulting in particular, more and more people are not only using agents, they are prioritizing them. They would rather have an agent do the task for them than learn and understand how they could do the task themselves.
This is really impacting grant writing, and the stakes are high. The draft EIC Work Programme 2027 (version 4) allocates €578 million to the EIC Accelerator, with €428 million for Open and €150 million for Challenges. These figures remain provisional until the European Commission adopts the work programme.
When working with a consultant, the applicant basically wants the expertise rather than having everything written for them, which is fine. Some companies want the full writing done for them, other companies want to do it themselves with their own agent, and I offer services for both use cases. If you are going to use agents, here is what I think is the most efficient workflow.
You Start from Nothing and End with PDF Files and a Video
There are a lot of different tools you can use, and the setup depends on whether you are collaborating with a consultant, working with a team or writing alone. Whatever the case may be, you start from nothing and at the end you need the PDF files and the video. Under the draft 2027 rules, a short proposal contains a 12-page form, a pitch deck of up to ten slides and a video of up to three minutes.
Number One: Start from a Good Template
I recommend starting from a good template. If you start with the official document and hand it to an agent, you will get a horrible proposal. I have reviewed a lot of proposals written by AI based only on the official template, and they do not look good. They look like obviously AI-created text, and they are not adjusted to what the evaluators are actually looking for, because what is in the template and what the evaluators have to screen are two different things.
On top of that, you need the experience to understand what actually goes through. It is one thing to look at the template and another to look at the evaluation criteria, but the actual realism of what is able to pass steps one, two and three is a completely different story. In the draft 2027 process, four experts assess the short proposal and at least three GO decisions are required to proceed. The full proposal in step two then runs to 30 pages, a narrative of no more than 20 pages plus 10 for the implementation, and the jury interview comes after that.
So number one: have a good template.
Number Two: Expertise and Instructions
Number two is the expertise and the instructions to properly fill each section. In addition, you have to understand two things:
- The data you actually need to produce the sections.
- The narrative on how you want to set up the entire project.
The narrative is going to impact everything from customer to market and commercial strategy, and even the technology and the products you are going to write about.
The data you need might not be obvious to you. Maybe you have a business and maybe you already have some revenues, but you have not fully defined the cornerstones of your business model. There are a number of things you need to have before you even start the writing:
- The distribution
- The developments
- The marketing strategy
- The competitors
- The unique selling points
Number Three: The Review
The third aspect is the review. Once you have the completed proposal, everything is properly written and everything is in the right format, you need to make sure that the entire proposal works.
This is a very common problem, especially if AI is writing it. Yes, AI can cross-reference, it can fact-check and it can make sure everything is consistent. But maybe the narrative for the problem does not make any sense when you look at the market, the competitors or the customers. You have to make sure everything makes sense, and it has to be a story that is completely connected.
Working in an Agent Environment
When it comes to working with agents, there are a lot of different tools. I really prefer working in an agent environment where you have the agent in the sidebar or in the terminal. If you are working offline on your computer, I think working in the terminal with markdown files works super well, and you can then have an MCP integration directly into Google Docs.
The Most Important Part: Version Control
The most important part when working with an agent, especially with a team where each team member has an agent, is version control. You can use the suggested changes feature if you are on Google Docs, so that you have track changes. My favorite is Git version control: you have the markdown file and you can directly see everything that was added and everything that was removed.
You might have the perfect proposal, but at the last minute you let the agent update some number, it hallucinates and it messes everything up. So once you have the complete proposal done, you have to read everything very carefully, and you have to be vigilant about using version control for every single change. That way you make sure the agent does not make a silly mistake, which happens all the time, even with the flagship models.
A silly mistake is expensive here because failed attempts are limited. The draft 2027 rules count three unsuccessful submissions per legal entity, from 1 January 2024.
The Part You Have to Do Yourself: The Funding and Tenders Portal
Maybe this is intentional, probably not, but the European Commission's Funding and Tenders portal feels very heavy, bloated and outdated. It is already a nightmare for a human to access, because there are so many redirects and bugs, it is very tricky sometimes to log in properly, and you need two-factor authentication.
So I would be surprised if you have an agent that can reliably create a draft and submit a proposal for you. That is what you have to do. If you do it all the time, it is actually very easy. But this is the one thing you have to take care of yourself, even if you let the agent write the proposal.
