Can ChatGPT write a business proposal?

The short answer is yes.

ChatGPT technically can write a business proposal.

However, it won’t guarantee that your proposal will differ from any other if you don’t add a human touch when writing it.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a tool that allows users to enter prompts to generate humanlike text.

It can help in brainstorming ideas and outlining the structure of your future business plan.

In other words, ChatGPT is better as a handy assistant to streamline the writing process.

We’ll go over exactly how with some useful examples below.

How to write a business proposal with ChatGPT as an assistant

Note: The fundamental part of using ChatGPT for business proposal writing is feeding well-crafted prompts. Whether it’s a general outline or specifics like market analysis and financial projections, the better the inputs you feed into a language model, the more optimal results AI tools like ChatGPT can deliver.

Let’s cover three sections of a business plan as examples to get you headed in the right direction: Outline, Executive Summary, and Operations and Management.

1. Form an outline

Every business idea needs to move to the planning stage in order to seriously begin.

Tell ChatGPT you want to start with an outline to help define the steps to take.

As our business proposal example, we’ll use an idea for an app that we want to build out.

Here’s what a prompt might look like:

Prompt: “I am writing a business proposal for a new app and need assistance in accomplishing this task — creating a basic outline for a future business proposal. Please generate one with emphasis on app development in the electric vehicle sector.”

Here’s how the result might look:

2. Generate an executive summary

This would be your opening statement, and represents as clear and concise a description of what your business does and who can benefit from.

Key elements include:

Offer description;
Your current business state;
What numbers and achievements you currently have to showcase to investors/partners;
Desired goals.

Here’s what a prompt might look like:

“My business is called [name]. It provides [products or services you offer] to [ target audience]. The revenue model is [explain it in details]. This business benefits users by [explain what makes your business beneficial to users and for investors]. Our current revenue state is [financial position]. So far we have [outline current company state/achieved goals] and we want to [describe your desired goals or revenue].”

“Please help me generate a short executive summary that represents this information in a clear and concise executive summary for the first page of my business plan. Please follow a tone that is [describe your preferred business tone of voice].”

And here’s how the result may appear:

3. Create an operations and management section

Explain how your business is going to run in practice.

Potential investors and partners want to know how your business plan will achieve desired goals — pricing, marketing strategy, financial projections around profitability, and so on — and that is where you can use ChatGPT to help formulate all the data in a clear and direct manner.

Here’s what that prompt might look like:

“Now please dive into the details of how the business operations and management will work. Please include details on [people, numbers, or other elements of your business] and processes [describe how the product or services functions] that will ensure this business runs smoothly and achieves its goals by the end/ according to the timeline [the desired date].”

“Please also Include how we deliver the product or service by [describe the delivery team work], how we ensure quality control through [describe internal processes you implement], how we manage [any other sections you want to include]. Incorporate this information: [describe anything else for ChatGPT to include].”

And the possible result:

Tips for using ChatGPT to create a business proposal

1. Be as specific as possible

Provide enough context so that ChatGPT’s chatbot can understand what you’re asking for and what you want to get by the end of text generation.

This means including specific and relevant information that can help the language model dive deeper into the details. Open-ended questions are the best way to go.

Consider the following tips:

Start with “What,” “Why,” “How,” or “Can you explain” to generate detailed responses.
Avoid asking yes/no questions or those that may be answered with too little content.
Avoid complex sentence structures or any kind of jargon that could confuse ChatGPT.
Add extra information or prompts to guide ChatGPT’s response.

2. Review and fact-check the content

Validate ChatGPT’s responses with outside sources before incorporating it into your business proposal.

Cover all aspects: research, data, numbers, market overview and so forth.

Always verifying is essential, as artificial intelligence tools make mistakes just like their human counterparts, but also because, at present, ChatGPT’s abilities are limited to events up to September 2021.

3. Teach ChatGPT your writing style

You don’t have to rely on ChatGPT’s default writing style — you can teach it how to mimic your own. Follow these steps:

Find something that you wrote or any example of a business plan you like.
Send it to ChatGPT and ask it to analyze the writing style (“Here is a business proposal I like because of [add why]. Can you please analyze its writing style?”)
Continue working in the same conversation and ask ChatGPT to use this writing style for your own business proposal (“Can you please adopt the writing style you just analyzed and write an executive summary for my business proposal [describe your business using the example of the prompt we provided above]”).

4. Ask ChatGPT to become an editor

Once the business proposal is ready, you can ask the tool to become an editor. Insert your written business plan (or a paragraph you are not sure about) into a conversation and use ChatGPT to fix grammar mistakes, correct your tone, or improve the overall structure.

Prompt example:

Use the PandaDoc platform for winning business proposals

While ChatGPT can technically write an entire business proposal for you, the language model works best as an assistant.

The generated answers might be extremely useful and only require minimal tweaking, or you may end up needing to refine your prompts in order to guide ChatGPT toward a desired response.

The entire business proposal writing process can be streamlined using PandaDoc.

Begin by choosing from an assortment of templates to help kick start your proposal writing, and opt for using Panda AI to help complete text blocks (like ChatGPT, our assistant is also powered by OpenAI).

Our platform will support you every step of the way.

Try for free