Three Ways ChatGPT Can Help GovCons Win
The Big Fear
Our greatest fear, in the face of digital transformation, is of becoming irrelevant. I loved Brene Brown’s podcast conversation with Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neely about just that. Do listen! Read more
One of my dearest friends – a gifted writer who majored in journalism – confided in me that ChatGPT left her in overwhelming despair. At first, she felt on the verge of irrelevance: that her gifts would no longer be valued. Then, she felt sent into a frenzy of copywriting, trying to beat the machine in creating a torrent of words that she was sure a human reader could tell came from another human heart.
Used wisely, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools are just that: tools. Can I tell whether a message that captures my attention, gives me hope, or even inspires me to pick up the phone and call someone I’ve never met, was generated by a machine?
And…what if it was?
If it was done well, then the human who wanted to reach me still had to go through a lot of effort to figure out what was going to work, and probably tried more than a few times that didn’t work.
Ever receive a greeting card that touched your heart…even though the person who sent it didn’t write it? They picked it, and signed it. How is that different?
They’re not going to replace the art of deep, authentic, connection. That will always be the province of humans. We, as receivers of the message, get to decide whether or not the message speaks to us
Learn to Speak Their Language
How can CHATGPT help GovCons?
Discovery
Critical Thinking
ChatGPT can give us the opportunity to sharpen our critical thinking. One of my longtime friends, now a university professor, issued a ChatGPT challenge to her students:
“Generate a ChatGPT essay using the essay prompt of your choice. Annotate with citations from primary and secondary sources, showing where and how the ChatGPT essay is accurate/inaccurate, and provide a commentary on the merits or otherwise of the ChatGPT essay. In your conclusion, comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the ChatGPT essay, based on your experience. Include a bibliography of all works cited or consulted. 100% of the grade is based on the notes and commentary.”
Could you tell the difference between a proposal written by ChatGPT and the work of a professional proposal team?
Is there a unique way that your team uses language that gets the attention and engagement of your buyer in ways that a perfectly compliant, machine-written, proposal does not?
Reflection On Connection
ChatGPT is one more tool that makes us think. My husband tried an experiment: he asked ChatGPT to write a letter of recommendation for employment for him. Reading the result, he reflected, “The fascinating thing to me is how this illustrates how generic many recommendation letters generated by humans are. The question may not be whether we can tell a robot from a person, but a person from a robot… or if someone who writes like a robot is someone we wish to get a recommendation from.”
The question is not just what are we writing…but what are we doing? How are we engaging with each other? What has a lasting impact?
People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.
~ Maya Angelou
It’s whether the person who’s writing (or leaving voicemail, or sending greeting cards) has taken the time to get to know us well enough to make the nuances, the small interactions or communications personal.
They know we’re not fond of puppy pictures, but could look at cats all day long. Or that we miss that family cabin in Montana, but only in the summertime. Or that we loved our stint with the Coast Guard in Elizabeth City. And that if the project we’re working on goes well, we’d love to get the promotion to get reassigned there.
That stuff doesn’t make it into proposals. But it is the stuff that means that when your proposal lands on my desk, I know that the team of real humans who are behind it really have my back.
Machines don’t pick the winners. They might recommend a short list. But at the end of the day, there’s no such thing as doing business with “the government.” There’s only doing business together as humans…humans who have everything on the line when they choose us.