From 5 days to 1hr!!! · Clief Notes

From 5 days to 1hr!!!

Hi all.

Quick background - The organisation I work for recently signed an agreement with Anthropic and last week we got access to their most recent models (Haiku, Sonnet and Opus). We’re predominantly a Microsoft house so have been using OpenAI this whole time and I have a Copilot licence. With everything I’ve learnt in this community, it’s been the biggest frustration not having access to tools that I can leverage to build ICM structure. I was trying to build my own if I’m honest.

This week that changed as getting the Anthropic models also gives me access to the Copilot Cowork ‘Agent’ (frontier, and not just an agent 🤦). I now have something that can interact with my folder structure and today I completed testing of a workflow for creating proposals off the back of receiving an RFP - a process that usually takes 2-4 people a working week (5 days) of collaboration, research, meetings, etc, but took me just over 1 hour to have a fully branded working draft, off of the prompt “A new RFP has just come in - see attached”!!! (Screenshot for proof)

We have a pretty rigorous process when we receive RFPs, so to be clear exactly what’s going on:

Validate the RFP against a number of criteria first to establish its something worth our time responding and bidding for.
Go through a research stage to gather information about the client, the industry, competitors (known or potential), case studies etc.
Analyse all research with additional context of our relationships and previous opportunities or projects if they exist. This additional data is all store in a CRM that has limited access to only senior people. Artefacts are created here with matrices of competitor comparison analysis, value wedges and our approach based on the case studies.
Map out our value proposition comparatively to potential competitors and develop the story we want to tell. (All this before we start building out the proposal and embed this information into it)
Build out the proposal. There is a template but it’s extensive and requires shaving down quite often. This is also done by junior members more often who are just pulling information in without understanding what it all means.
Check that branding guidelines are in place throughout and consistent.
First draft is now ready for senior review and changes

All 6 stages getting me to that first draft took just over an hour. The output isn’t perfect, but it’s 85-90% there, and my only involvement was providing clarification and approval at predesigned checkpoints (I actually gave it pre-approval for the whole build of the proposal so I could have fine tuned along the way.)

For this workflow, it referenced 3 skills, 4 Markdown files, 4 templates and created a new client folder to store all the outputs and artefacts in (extra step).

Game changer is an understatement!!!

Happy to field questions on specifics if I can help anyone doing similar things

4 comments