What a general-purpose model does well
It writes fast, in English or French, in whatever tone you ask for. It tightens a paragraph that runs long, rephrases a heavy sentence, translates a section, suggests an outline when the page is blank.
It also reads what you give it. Paste a section of the tender and ask it to sum up the expectations, and most of the time it will do it correctly. Paste a paragraph of your proposal with the criterion it must serve, and it will tell you what is missing.
For anything to do with form, it is a good tool. It would be a shame not to use it.
What it cannot know
The trouble starts with substance. A general-purpose model has no access to your library. It does not know:
- your past mandates, their clients, their dates and their amounts
- your people's résumés, their titles, their degrees and their years of experience
- your references and whom to call at each one
- your past proposals, the ones that won and the ones that lost
- what the client told you in the meeting
- the tender's evaluation grid and addenda, unless you give them to it
None of this is a flaw in the model. These are your firm's facts, and they are not written anywhere it could read them.
The real risk is the invented fact
Ask a general-purpose model to "add a similar mandate" or to "strengthen the project manager's experience". It will not answer that it doesn't know. It will write a plausible sentence, with a credible client, a likely year and a certification that sounds right.
In a blog post, that would not matter much. In a service proposal, it is a serious problem. The committee can call the reference, compare the résumé with the certificates, or recognize a mandate it knows. One false fact casts doubt on all the others, and it commits the firm that signs the proposal.
The trap is worse because the invented text is often the best-written part of the section. It never had to deal with the facts.
How to use it without losing points
A few simple rules change the result a lot.
- Give it the facts instead of asking for them. Paste the résumé extract, the mandate sheet, the grid criterion. It will write from what you give it.
- Ask it to rewrite, not to create. "Rewrite this paragraph to answer criterion 3, without adding any fact" produces a very different text from "write our experience in residual materials management".
- Ask it what it is missing. "Before you write, list the information you need that I haven't given you" brings the gaps out instead of filling them.
- Check every fact against its source. Names, years, amounts, titles, years of experience. This is the one step you cannot delegate.
- Check grid coverage at the end. Paste the list of expected elements and ask where each one is handled in your text.
| The model has to guess | The model works on your facts |
|---|---|
| Add a similar mandate in municipal planning. | Here is the sheet for our 2023 mandate for a regional county municipality. Sum it up in three sentences for criterion 2, without adding any fact. |
| Strengthen the project manager's experience. | Here is her résumé. Put first what answers the requirement of ten years managing municipal projects, without adding anything. |
| Write our understanding of the mandate. | Here is section 3 of the tender and the elements expected under criterion 1. Before you write, list what you are missing. |
One last precaution, which is about your firm more than the tool. Before pasting tender documents, a résumé or meeting notes into an online service, check your firm's policy and the terms of the tool you use.
What still takes time, even with a good model
With these rules the text is safer, but the work has not gone away. It has moved. You still have to find the right mandate in the files, the current version of the résumé, the reference who still answers the phone, then paste it all back into the conversation, proposal after proposal.
That is where the time goes, in our view, much more than in the writing. A firm that answers twenty tenders a year looks up the same facts twenty times.
How Clarido does it
Clarido does not replace your assistant. It takes care of what the assistant cannot know.
In Clarido, your library holds the firm profile, your clients, your team and their résumés, your past projects and your past proposals. Clarido reads the tender documents and their addenda, then writes the first draft from those records, carrying the exact facts over as they are: names, figures, dates. A former employee is never proposed for the team.
When the library does not provide a piece of information, Clarido writes "[À fournir par la firme : …]" ("to be provided by the firm") instead of inventing it. The marker is highlighted in the editor, where you can replace it with the information directly, and it stays highlighted in the Word export until someone fills it.
She has led three planning mandates for municipalities of comparable size, and holds [À fournir par la firme : exact professional title and year obtained].
You then finish the text wherever you like. The Word export follows your firm's template. A second export produces a text to paste into the assistant of your choice, with the proposal, the analysis context and, if you want, the team's résumés and instructions such as "Anticipate the committee's questions". The assistant then works on your facts instead of guessing them.