We want to give you some insight and reassurance about how we use AI at Venturenomix.
It is a question we are asked regularly by our clients who are interested in understanding how AI is improving our success rate in grant writing and how their IP is being kept private.
At Venturenomix, we have had a clear and actionable approach to the use of AI from the moment it became clear it was a game-changing and unavoidable technology.
As standard, we:
- Vet all AI tools (yes, we read the terms and conditions);
- Pay for AI tools when we know data privacy matters (ChatGPT Teams, for example, that ensures data is not used for training and is encrypted);
- Ask for permission when recording meetings with external parties; and
- Share learning about the AI tools we use and how we use them (best practice sessions are a regular occurrence here).
LLMs and data privacy in grant writing
A colleague of mine told me about a training event they attended on the use of AI where the host underlined the importance of getting permission before recording client/customer meetings using free versions of AI note-takers. My colleague was shocked to see people writing this advice down as if they had never considered this. We always ask permission and we always use encrypted services.
Use Cases for AI in Grant Writing
Writing complete grant applications using AI? Nope, not us.
We do not use AI to write entire grant applications at Venturenomix. Why? Because even with substantial investment of time and money in developing and training a self-hosted LLM, this approach does not come close to matching the success rates of experienced human grant writers. More importantly, no LLM has the insights and experience needed to ask the pertinent questions that will get to the core of the innovation, or the secret to commercial success, which makes the difference between an outstanding (successful) grant application and an average (unsuccessful) one.
Our grant writers, or innovation consultants, all have at least 15 years’ experience and have written winning applications for numerous funding calls.
Grant Search
We are dedicating time and resources to develop and train our in-house FUnding SEarch platform (FUSE): a combination of good old-fashioned database technology and semantic search and matching capability enabled by generative AI. This speeds up our ability to find R&D grant funding opportunities for our clients and partners, and helps us to narrow down the many opportunities to a useful short-list for priority action, saving us hours of manual searching and matching time. Instead, we can use that time for more valuable tailored consultancy work for our clients.
Competitor Analysis
ChatGPT can be persuaded to do the initial leg work in finding competitors and, with a little practice, produces a neatly formatted table with the information we need to make a quick choice, discard or investigate further. This has become an ongoing theme – initial results from AI, further investigation by our team. We have to be very specific in the prompts we use to generate the most relevant results. As Agnes Stenborn, founder of IN/LAB correctly says “Crap in, crap out”: if you take the time to define an excellent question, you are much more likely to get an excellent response.
Current State of the Art Research
This is one of the core elements of R&D grant applications (essentially how we demonstrate innovation) that used to be highly time-consuming. ChatGPT (for research) and Perplexity (for reference checks) speed up this process while simultaneously casting the net wider than any human researcher could, especially considering the tight timeframes common in the grant writing domain. Our state-of-the-art research is now more accurate and more thorough because of GenAI, despite the amount of time invested in asking the right questions and triple-checking the outputs.
Policy Alignment
Identifying international and national policies relevant to a proposed R&D project has become less time-consuming with GenAI tools. Further, AI’s ability to pull out the relevant 2-3 pages from a 150+ page policy document has really improved our quality of life at Venturenomix! Of course, you must have a strategic knowledge of the ecosystem to be able to know where to look and how to interpret / overlay the results, but the content crunching is a joy now. Experience (where to look) + AI (looking) + Diligence (checking) + Insight (consultancy) = higher quality grant applications.
Note-taking
Every member of our team now has Otter.AI, as far as we can tell, the best note-taking software around. It comes to every meeting (unless our clients don’t want it there, see above) and allows us to concentrate on the meeting rather than taking notes. Meetings are neatly summarised and actions shared with all attendees. This has probably been the most impactful use of AI in our day-to-day lives so far.
Summing up AI Use Cases in Grant Writing
This list is not exhaustive, and it will expand over time as we learn more. It hopefully gives an insight into how we use AI in Grant Writing. If you have questions – please ask. If you have concerns, please raise them. We are happy to listen and help.
Some thoughts on AI in Grant Writing
- I would advise anyone seeking the support of a grant writer to embrace the fact that AI tools can help improve success when they are used in a smart way by experienced grant writers.
- The real value-add of a human grant writer comes from their insight, questions, experience, connections, partners, diligence, and personality.
- AI has enabled a destructive business model in grant writing: automating the process of generating a grant application that scores ‘fine’ for an up-front fee that seems competitive. It is a total gamble to engage with grant writing companies that have an ‘AI platform to manage the grant writing process’. In our experience, they are old-fashioned hard-sell businesses that add no real value: their success rates are terrible. Plus, they needlessly flood the system, causing funders to extend their assessment timelines (even further) to be able to process much higher numbers of submitted applications.
- One day, AI may be able to write a complete grant application and win funding with little or no human input. AI may also be able to manage a business, inspire a team, network with business partners and support customers. Even so, I would want human-led experiences. AI is a tool and we are using it to improve our service, not to make us lazy.
- If you want to meet people who understand AI, how to develop AI solutions or how to optimise content for AI search, we can make introductions to some top innovators in the field.
- Likewise, if you know people who are finding ways to use AI that genuinely adds value, we would love an introduction.
- We are not interested in buying in an external AI grant writing platform, so anyone thinking about trying to sell us one: please don’t bother.
- We are interested in AI training where it is delivered by experts in our domain, such as Kristjan Zemljic who has already helped our team on our journey.
Alex Chalkley
I have over 20 years experience in founding and scaling businesses, mainly focused on the non-dilutive funding sector. Since 2008, I have built, trained and mentored teams to successfully draw down over €100m in non-dilutive funding from the UK and EU for clients spanning multiple sectors.
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