Bid Writers in the Age of AI: Why your job isn’t at risk – It’s evolving

Introduction

Let’s get this out of the way: yes, AI is changing proposal writing. And yes, some organizations will undoubtedly attempt to slash headcount, believing they can offload bid writing to generative tools. But they’ll be wrong and probably lose.

Because while AI can draft, rephrase, and check for compliance, it cannot understand human motivation. It can’t interpret nuanced strategy, build trust through tone, or adapt a message for a reluctant evaluator. In short: AI can generate content; only humans can craft a winning story.

This post is for bid writers who feel unsure about their future. The short answer? You’re not obsolete. But your role is evolving. And if you embrace that evolution, you’ll be more essential than ever.

1. The role of the bid writer is changing

From ‘Craft as Control’ to ‘Craft as Orchestration’

Historically, writers controlled the page. Every section was a bespoke output; every draft manually built from scratch. But with AI in the loop, writing becomes more like orchestration. The writer’s job is not always to type, but to guide, shape, prompt, and refine.

You’re no longer the soloist; you’re the conductor.

In an ideal world, along with the rest of the bid team, you define the win themes. You ensure that the AI tool has been loaded with the right inputs, and you prompt iteratively. You then shape the responses to meet voice, tone, and strategy. And then you edit – ruthlessly.

This shift means less time writing words and more time ensuring the words work.

New bid writing skills, same purpose

The purpose of the bid writer hasn’t changed: to persuade, to comply, to win. But the skills that serve that purpose are evolving:

• Prompt engineering: Crafting queries that yield better AI output.
• Content interrogation: Asking, “Is this actually persuasive?” “Does this reflect our strategy?”
• Thematic control: Ensuring consistency across AI-drafted sections.
• Storyline engineering: Turning content into narrative, especially when stitching disparate inputs.

What remains human

AI can mimic voice, but it can’t feel. It can mimic structure, but not strategy. The human edge lives in:

• Emotional intelligence: Knowing when a response feels flat.
• Persuasion: Creating energy, urgency, and credibility.
• Politics: Navigating internal stakeholder agendas.
• Judgement: Deciding when AI output is good enough and when to start over.

It also can’t read the room, doesn’t know your evaluator or remember what happened on the last bid. You do.

2. The bid team is changing too

What the traditional team looked (is still) like – A typical medium-to-large bid in the defence sector might include:

• 1 Proposal Manager
• 4–6 Writers
• 1–4 Reviewers
• 1 Graphic Designer
• Multiple SMEs looped in for detailed content and evidence/proof points

A team is designed based on what a writer can realistically achieve in the bid time frame. In this model, we don’t give writers more than three sections each, otherwise, the workload and trying to juggle multiple threads is too much.

Much time is spent reading and understanding all the requirements and trying to get the necessary information from multiple data sources and sometimes reluctant SMEs. Or in fact trying to wrestle the pen from SMEs who feel they know better. It’s time-consuming and stressful.

That’s not to say that writers won’t need to get familiar with the content and requirements in the new AI bid writing world. They still will, but they’ll be able to do it faster.

What an AI-enabled bid team looks like

Enter AI, and the model begins to shift:

• Proposal manager: Now a conductor of orchestration, not just a traffic manager.
• 2–3 writers: Smaller team but with higher skill. Not just writers, but prompt engineers, editors, and story architects.
• AI specialist / content engineer: New role. Maintains prompt libraries, builds templates, manages content reuse and fine-tunes tone models.
• 1 reviewer: Faster, more targeted reviews powered by AI-assisted checks.
• Visual strategist: Moves beyond design execution into storyboarding and message alignment.
• Knowledge curator / librarian: Optional, but powerful. Owns the content library, feeds the AI and ensures content hygiene.

AI handles the heavy lifting of formatting, spelling, repetition and even base-level tone. Humans do the strategy, nuance, and emotional shaping.

What this means for proposal writers

If you can prompt, shape, and judge AI content effectively, you become indispensable. You will:

• Produce more, faster
• Improve consistency and compliance
• Raise the quality of storytelling

But most importantly, you become a strategic voice in the bid. Not just a keyboard.
Writers who resist AI may find themselves phased out. Writers who embrace it will be those leading the next generation of bids.

Conclusion: Bid writer adaptation, not obsolescence

This isn’t a sunset story. It’s a reframe.

AI is not the end of bid writing. It’s the beginning of a new authorship model – one that rewards curiosity, judgement, and craft. To the writers worried about your future: you’re not being replaced. You’re being repositioned. And you’re more valuable than ever – if you’re ready to orchestrate.

Learn the tools. Lead the process. Stay human.
The winning bids of tomorrow will be shaped by people like you.

Our post on cultural adoption for bid teams also looks at the challenges facing bid teams and how to overcome them.

Article published: August 2025