As I’ve said before, you should write a proposal that resonates with the people who read it. In marketing terms, you write for the key personas in your target audience.
But what if your target audience never reads your proposal?
Diella, Albanian Minister of Procurement
In Albania, it’s possible that no person will read it.
“A new minister in Albania charged to handle public procurement will be impervious to bribes, threats, or attempts to curry favour. That is because Diella, as she is called, is an AI-generated bot.
“Prime Minister Edi Rama, who is about to begin his fourth term, said on Thursday that Diella, which means “sun” in Albanian, will manage and award all public tenders in which the government contracts private companies for various projects.”
The intent is to stop corruption from “gangs seeking to launder their money from trafficking drugs and weapons.”
When people evaluate proposals
But how savvy is Diella?
Let me provide a proposal evaluation example that has nothing to do with corruption, but illustrates why AI must be robust.
A couple of years before I became a proposal writer, I was a Request for Proposals (RFP) writer…sort of. A Moss Adams consultant and I assembled an RFP that required respondents to answer Yes or No to a checklist of questions.
When the consultant and I received the proposals, we selected two finalists…neither of whom responded “Yes” to every question like some submissions.
We figured that the ones who said “Yes” were just trying to get the maximum points, whether they could do the work or not.
The two finalists gave some thought to the requirements and raised legitimate concerns.
Can Diella detect corruption?
Hopefully Diella is too smart to be fooled by such shenanigans. But how can she keep the gangs out of Albania’s government procurements?
Certainly on one level Diella can conduct a Know Your Business check to ensure a bidder isn’t owned by a gang leader. But as we’ve seen before in Hungary, the beneficial owner may not be the legal owner. Can Diella detect that?
Add to this the need to detect whether the entity can actually do what it says it will do. While I appreciate that the removal of humans prevents a shady procurement official from favoring an unqualified bidder, at the same time you end up relying on a bot to evaluate the bidders’ claims to competency.
Of course this could all be a gimmick, and Diella will do nothing more than give the government the aura of scientific selection, while in reality the same procurement officers will do the same things, with the same results.
Let’s see what happens with the next few bids.
Bredemarket 
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