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What 32 APMP Members Told Us About the Future of Proposals

We talked to 32 APMP members across 6 continents about their proposal workflows. The consensus: AI is coming to proposals, but only if it respects the template.

contrl

10 May 2025 — 2 min read

TL;DR: Interviews with 32 APMP members revealed a global consensus: proposal teams want AI that produces finished deliverables in their templates, not just draft text in a chat window.

See how contrl turns RFPs into finished PowerPoints →

Why we did 32 interviews

Before building contrl, we needed to validate that the problem we experienced personally was universal. So we talked to 32 APMP members across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Government contractors, consulting firms, IT services, construction. Small firms and enterprises.

The interviews were structured around three questions: What does your current proposal workflow look like? Where does it break down? And what would you want an AI tool to actually do?

The universal pain point

Every single interviewee mentioned PowerPoint assembly as the most time-consuming part of their workflow. Not the writing. Not the strategy. The physical act of putting content into slides, formatting it to match the template, and making sure nothing was missed.

The second most common complaint: existing AI tools generate text but leave you with a copy-paste problem. You still need a human to turn ChatGPT output into a formatted proposal deck. Several people described this as "solving 30% of the problem and creating a new problem for the other 70%."

Try contrl free: Closed Beta starts March 30 →

What they wanted

The wish list was remarkably consistent. Take my RFP. Take my template. Give me a complete first draft in PowerPoint that I can review and refine. Do not make me copy-paste. Do not change my formatting. Do not miss requirements.

That is contrl. We built exactly what 32 APMP members described. We asked them what they needed, wrote it down, and built it.

Built by a 15-year bid veteran. Join the beta →

Still writing proposals the old way?

Contrl analyzes RFPs, builds win themes, and generates compliant drafts in your own PowerPoint templates. Your strategy, automated.

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Questions? Reach us at patrick@contrl.ai

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