From RFP to Finished PowerPoint, Without the Copy-Paste Marathon

TL;DR: contrl reads your RFP, builds a Win Theme (the strategic argument for why your company should win), maps that theme into a slide-by-slide storyline, and generates a finished PowerPoint deck in your company's template. No copy-paste. No reformatting. Closed beta starts March 30.

Most AI writing tools treat proposals like a fill-in-the-blank exercise. Paste your RFP, get a wall of text, then spend the next two days reformatting everything into your company's PowerPoint template.

We spent a lot of time sitting with proposal teams before building anything. What became clear pretty quickly was that the real bottleneck had nothing to do with writing speed. It was the strategic thinking that happens before anyone types a single sentence.

The real work happens before writing starts

Picture this: a 181-page RFP for an airport interactive media system lands on your desk. You don't start writing. You start reading, highlighting, cross-referencing, trying to decode what the client actually cares about beneath pages of compliance language and technical specifications. You pull up your company's past proposals to find reusable assets. You schedule a meeting with your team lead to hash out the win strategy.

That strategic planning phase typically eats more time than the drafting itself. Choosing your Win Theme. Mapping the storyline. Figuring out which company strengths align best with what the client is asking for. The best proposal managers we've talked to do this systematically, but it all lives inside their heads. There's no tool that captures this process, so it starts from scratch every single time.

What makes this worse is that the strategic framing is what actually wins bids. Two companies can have identical technical capabilities. The one that frames its proposal around the client's real motivation, not just the spec sheet, is the one that gets shortlisted. Your team lead knows this intuitively. But translating that intuition into a structured 45-slide PowerPoint deck under a tight deadline is where things fall apart.

How contrl approaches proposal writing

contrl follows the same strategic process your best team lead would use, before generating a single slide.

It starts by reading the RFP and extracting what actually matters. The business context behind the requirements, not just a flat list: why is this project happening now, what does the client value most, where are the evaluation criteria weighted heaviest. Take that airport RFP as an example. A standard AI tool would extract hardware specs and compliance checkboxes. contrl reads deeper: the project is part of a major terminal renovation, the client wants to transform passenger wait time into an engaging experience, and they're evaluating vendors on creative design and end-to-end architecture, not just lowest price. Every insight links back to the exact RFP page so you can verify it yourself.

From there, contrl proposes a few Win Theme directions based on the overlap between what the RFP demands and what your past proposals show you're strong at. For that airport project, one theme might center on passenger experience design, another on proven large-venue deployment track record, a third on data analytics capability. You pick the direction that fits, tweak it, or take the conversation somewhere else entirely. The strategic call stays with you.

Once you've locked the Win Theme, contrl builds out the storyline and maps it to the required proposal structure, section by section. It shows you where your strongest references should go, which parts carry the narrative weight, and which gaps you'll want to address manually because your template doesn't have matching content. Then it generates the full draft inside your existing PowerPoint template, preserving the format, tone, and slide structure your team has refined over years of bidding.

The output is a .pptx file that looks like your team built it. No reformatting at midnight. No copying paragraphs from a Word doc into slides one by one.

Every claim traces back to a source

One thing that kept coming up in our conversations with proposal managers: trust. Imagine submitting a proposal that references a project your company never actually delivered, or overstates a capability the client later asks you to prove. That's the kind of mistake that kills credibility before you even get to the presentation round.

contrl generates a verification report alongside every draft. Each claim traces back to its origin, whether that's a specific RFP page, a slide from your past proposal template, or content the AI composed from scratch. Anything without a clear source gets flagged, so you know exactly where to focus your review time instead of re-reading 45 slides line by line.

Your data stays on your machine

Proposals contain some of the most sensitive information in any company. Pricing strategies, competitive positioning, client relationships, proprietary methodologies. Every proposal manager we talked to said the same thing: uploading that to a cloud-based AI tool was a non-starter.

So contrl processes everything locally. Your RFP files, templates, and generated proposals never leave your machine. This wasn't a feature we added later for marketing purposes. It was a hard requirement from day one of development. If your security team wouldn't approve it, we didn't want to build it.

Who this is for

contrl is built for proposal managers and bid teams who respond to RFPs regularly. If you receive a thick RFP on Monday and need a polished PowerPoint proposal by Friday, this tool was designed around your workflow.

It's particularly useful if you find yourself doing the same strategic analysis from scratch every time, re-reading similar RFPs, digging through old proposals for reusable content, and building win strategies that feel like you're reinventing the wheel on every bid.

We've seen teams where the most experienced proposal lead spends half their week just setting up the strategic direction for each new bid. The actual writing gets delegated, but that initial framing work can't be. contrl compresses that framing phase from days to minutes, so your best people can focus on refining the strategy rather than building it from zero every time.

Join the closed beta

We're opening a closed beta on March 30th. It runs four weeks, completely free. We're looking for proposal professionals who want to test contrl with real RFPs and real templates, and who'll share honest feedback about what's working and what needs to change.

Spots are limited because we want to work closely with each participant.