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As our understanding of AI improves, its scope of application increases and the world of business grants is no exception. Finding grants and then applying can be a time consuming exercise, whether it’s the business owner themselves doing it or a professional grant writer. Also, it requires a level of knowledge as well as a number of inputs to make it work. Grant writers will have a good degree of knowledge of what’s available and how to craft an application but AI will improve speed, efficiency and success rates. For business owners, AI can help improve knowledge as well as giving them the ability to make their own application with more confidence and more efficiently.
AI is already at work in grant writing
AI is already being used to help grant writers be more efficient and increase productivity. It can do much of the basic work collating content for the application, but a degree of expert human input is still needed to both guide the AI and refine to ensure a strong final submission. Over time this process will be refined and productivity gains will benefit grant writers. There is a great deal of guidance and discussion on how AI is being used now and how this will develop moving forward. This Stanford article in a related field of medical grant writing is a good starting point.
Whether this process is happening for business owners is not clear. Do they have the confidence to use AI to put together their application? We can’t see any clear evidence of AI being used by business owners to apply for grants. However, this does look like a growth area and there are an increasing number of AI resources available to help business owners write grant applications.
Scope for AI in grant finding
Further back in the grants process the job of finding grants is also ripe for the use of AI. Here at getbusinessgrants.com we have the advantage of the most comprehensive database of UK grants to start with. We also possess a series of tools that make it easier to interrogate the database and find the right grant as well as produce alerts and reports. This gives us great scope for AI use and we are now looking at how AI can improve these functions even further – as well as making grant finding quicker and more accurate, it will be possible to produce analysis in the form of tables and charts to show specifics e.g. the breakdown of grants by region, sector or purpose.
Into grants education and beyond
AI can also be used to improve knowledge transfer to improve awareness and capability of the wider business population as well as matching to other non grant data sources to enhance the output – for example as well as returning grants that you could apply for say innovation in the biotech sector, AI could add in events that you could attend in this arena for networking or additional ideas once you have the funding.
By applying AI to all aspects of grants, from education and finding to applying using the money, it is possible to foresee a situation where grant funds are more widely and effectively used which would be an important contributor to economic growth.