The RFP That Ate My Mom's Weekend

How many of you have ever filled out an RFP?

If you have, you already know. RFPs are super long, annoying, tedious. Every organization has its own extra page, its own version of the same question asked just differently enough that you can’t reuse anything from the past. It is the paperwork Olympics, and the prize is permission to compete for the actual work.

My mom had this problem. She spent an entire weekend filling out an RFP for a potential client. A whole weekend, gone. And here is the part that got me: it was not even complicated work. It was tedious work.

She was already using AI. That was the trap.

My mom is not behind on this stuff. She was already using AI on that RFP. But she was using it like most people are: in the browser.

Copy a question into the chat. Paste the answer back. Upload a document. Hope the chat remembers what she told it last week. Then go back into the PDF and fill everything in by hand anyway.

The browser version of AI is a helpful stranger. It answers questions, but it holds nothing, connects nothing, and touches nothing. Get off the browser. That is the whole thesis of this episode, and honestly, most of this series.

What we built

I built her a website and an agent, using a couple of simple things from previous episodes.

First, a brain for her organization. One Obsidian vault. Into it went every RFP she had ever won. Her ethos. Her website copy. Emails. Her client list. Her referrals. Everything that makes her company her company, in one place an AI can read.

Then, the agent. Feed a new RFP into the system, and the agents analyze everything in there. Using skills, it fills out every PDF and every blank in the document. The only things it skips are signature lines and information it genuinely does not have. And everything it skips, it flags, so she gets a short list of exactly what is left to complete.

The result

The whole process took less than an hour. With very relevant information, pulled from her real wins and her real voice. Better than she could have ever imagined. Her words.

A whole weekend, down to under an hour. And it is repeatable. Now when an RFP comes in, she does not brace for the lost weekend. She feeds it into the system and the agents handle everything but the signature.

Steal it: the pattern works for any paperwork

RFPs, grant applications, vendor forms, insurance renewals. Any document that asks you the same questions about your own business over and over.

1. Build the organization brain. One vault: past winning applications, your standard answers, your story, your numbers. This is an afternoon of collecting, and you only do it once.

2. Get AI on the computer, not the browser tab. The agent needs to read your vault and touch your files. A chat window can do neither.

3. Feed it the new document and one instruction. Fill everything you can from my brain, skip nothing silently, and flag every blank you cannot fill.

4. Do the human 5 percent. Review, complete the flags, sign. That is the part that should take an hour. Now it is the only part.

Your turn

This is something you can steal. That’s the point of this whole series. Make your work a little easier every day, and make some more money while you are at it.

Comment below on what you’re working on. I’d love to find out, and help.

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This is Part 7 of Cool Shit I Built With AI. It runs on the second brain from Part 2 and the get-off-the-browser lesson that started everything. The videos are on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at @danielonpurpose.