The EIC Accelerator funding (grant and equity, with blended financing option) by the European Commission (EC) and the European Innovation Council (EIC) awards up to €2.5 million in grant and €10 million in equity financing per project (€12.5 million total). This article provides a perspective on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in grant writing and its impact on startups and Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) as well as professional writers, freelancers, and consultants.

Generative AI is disrupting professional writing and consultancy services for grant funding programs such as the EIC Accelerator. While the last article analyzed the ethical considerations and history of AI and the EIC, this article investigates the challenges and opportunities of using AI in grant writing.

With the European Innovation Council (EIC) very likely already using AI in their evaluation process, albeit unconfirmed, it is only natural for consultants, professional writers, and applicants such as SMEs and startups to follow suit.

Use Cases for AI: Keep It Simple

The current use cases for AI are very straightforward since they directly lend themselves to enhancing productivity during the writing process:

• Research: Perplexity's, ChatGPT's, and Grok’s DeepSearch features are a godsend for researching proposal information. Especially market analyses, EU policy information, or the skimming of documents becomes a breeze with AI tools.
• Structuring: Since all generative, chat-based AI tools can take in attachments, providing it with the official EIC Accelerator templates and requesting it to generate a structure is a simple and efficient way of speeding up the process.
• Writing: Many companies already use this function by simply asking ChatGPT or Grok to restructure their pitch decks or business plans into the template format. While the output is often not perfectly aligned with what the EIC wants, applicants prefer the tradeoff since working for many weeks or months on a proposal that distracts them from building their business while only exhibiting small chances of success is a poor proposition.

Of course, using AI for the EIC Accelerator is not that simple since the template and evaluation criteria do not contain all of the information that evaluators are looking for. If anything, both the official template and ESR criteria are rather obscure and subjective.

A great deal of what the EIC wants is printed between the lines, which is the exact part that ChatGPT has trouble reading. Consultants have to consider the perspective of evaluators during the writing process based on many years of trial and error, which is difficult to train an AI agent in—at least for now.

Extraction: Why Using AI for the EIC Accelerator Is So Difficult

One significant feature of EIC Accelerator proposals is their level of detail. A professional writer or applicant has to incorporate as much detail as possible to avoid being rejected by an overly pedantic evaluator who is just looking for things to criticize. This is a problem for automated AI tools because the detail needed for proper proposal writing might not be found in the source material.

That is the first hurdle in using AI for EIC Accelerator writing: Extraction. How can you get details from a company they might not even know themselves? Often, companies do not have much of the data that is needed to create a comprehensive EIC Accelerator application at hand. This includes a complete list of customers, current leads, an overview of their Unique Selling Points (USP), and more—this is why extracting data from applicants such as startups and SMEs can be difficult.

For an AI tool to be effective at generating grant proposals, there needs to be a frictionless process of data extraction from the applicant company. Without it, the process would turn into a barrage of form fields that is as time-consuming as writing the proposal from scratch.

Using ChatGPT to answer questions is easy because applicants can rely on the AI to respond in their stead since the AI is their ally in the process. It executes whatever they tell it to. Both the applicant and the AI are directed at the same thing: The EIC Accelerator template.

But an expert consultant must direct their attention to the client first, since they know they need to gain all of the necessary information from them, and very often, that includes developing that information from scratch. That extraction step is difficult to achieve with AI since it is usually based on the experience of the consultant who knows what to include and what to avoid.

Extraction Steps: Using AI To Extract Data

To summarize, when using AI for EIC Accelerator proposals, there are two core challenges: Extracting data from the applicant, as well as converting that data into the right format and at the right place. The former can take different approaches, each with its respective trade-offs:

• Making the Applicant Work: The most obvious approach is to tell applicants to fill out a template (i.e., see ChatEIC’s template), but this approach, as the name suggests, requires work. Busy people who need AI to help them abhor extra work.
• Using Less Detail or Placeholders: Without extracting sufficient data, the proposal generated by AI will lack detail. This can be problematic, as the proposal must be detailed to be successful but letting the AI add placeholders in the output is a workaround (i.e., see ChatEIC’s output placeholders).

We are therefore back to the beginning of this dilemma: The EIC Accelerator application process is a lot of work, so we want to use AI. But AI requires applicants and consultants to think and work, so what’s the point of using AI?

Tradeoff, My Old Friend: Facing The Inevitable

There will need to be a compromise. Either the applicant must put in the work to provide all of the data an AI needs or the application's quality will suffer. But there is no right or wrong answer, as it is not always the best proposals that win. It is usually a combination of a good company, a good project, and a good amount of luck that determines the winner—and sometimes two out of the three criteria are enough to succeed.

Therefore, it can be a reasonable tradeoff to simply use a pitch deck and some business plan snippets to generate a complete proposal with only minimal adjustments. Preparing an EIC Accelerator proposal that way might be less sophisticated compared to spending months refining it, but it will save time since a few days are better than months.

Nonetheless, AI writing will always be helpful, no matter how much work the applicant will put in. Here are common use cases for ChatEIC, an AI writer for the EIC Accelerator, and the time saved compared to writing without any AI tools:

• No Work Necessary: Simply use existing data such as a pitch deck or upload a rejected proposal to bulk generate a new proposal based on the contained data.
  • Time saved: 99%.
• Some Work Necessary: Take the time to fill out a template before generating the proposal since the data will be essential for the AI to provide details.
  • Time saved: 90%.
• More Work Necessary: Generate every single proposal section one by one to ensure that all data requirements are satisfied.
  • Time saved: 70%.

In the end, each use case still saves a lot of time because of the nature of generative AI. It will write coherent text so that the user can focus on the overall structure and content.

But What Makes an AI Tool Easy to Use?

Usability: Just Do It, Please

The one thing everyone wants from AI is to perform magic without requiring any work. Isn’t that the allure of AI? It can execute any task on your behalf so you don’t have to. But, as we all have learned by now, it is not that simple.

Prompting is everything. Well, prompting and the quality of the input are everything. If the input is rich in relevant data and the prompts (i.e., instructions for the AI) are perfectly aligned with the EIC’s obscure evaluation process, then the result will be of high quality.

But now the next challenge appears: The AI must be adaptable and versatile. For every applicant who takes their time to provide structured and high-quality raw data, some just upload a poor summary and expect a well-structured proposal containing all the perfect nuances that were not part of the input.

And therein lies the challenge: How can you create an AI grant proposal writer—specifically for the EIC Accelerator—that is capable of addressing all applicants' needs?

The answer is to make the instructions restrictive enough to ensure that each section is perfectly adjusted to the EIC Accelerator proposal while still being open to integrating critical data. If the data is absent, the AI should add placeholders or be vague, depending on the circumstance. If the data is present, it will integrate it right away.

But why should the AI be vague in some cases? Well, as every professional writer knows, there is no one-size-fits-all rule about what needs to be quantified, expanded upon, or who must be mentioned. It will all depend on the particular company, their technology and their business model. Sometimes it is better to keep a section vague than trying to structure text around a placeholder that does not exist.

It is therefore better to let the input data define the spectrum of detail in the beginning instead of relying on the AI to know what details the company will actually have available during the editing process.

But now the big question arises: How is the quality of an AI-written proposal? This will be discussed in Part 3.

These tips are not only useful for European startups, professional writers, consultants and Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME) but are generally recommended when writing a business plan or investor documents.

Deadlines: Post-Horizon 2020, the EIC Accelerator accepts Step 1 submissions now while the deadlines for the full applications (Step 2) under Horizon Europe are listed below. The Step 1 applications must be submitted weeks in advance of Step 2. The next EIC Accelerator cut-off for Step 2 (full proposal) can be found here. After Brexit, UK companies can still apply to the EIC Accelerator under Horizon Europe albeit with non-dilutive grant applications only - thereby excluding equity-financing. Switzerland has resumed its participation in Horizon Europe and is now eligible for the EIC Accelerator.

Contact: You can reach out to us via this contact form to work with a professional consultant.

AI Grant Writer: ChatEIC is a fully automated EIC Accelerator grant proposal writer: Get it here.

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