Proposal first draft

The risk in an automated proposal is not bad prose, it is a promise your company cannot keep or a price your finance team did not set. So the agent assembles from approved blocks, and the checks are about claims and numbers.

The job on one screen

Runs when	A rep marks an opportunity ready for proposal.
Reads	Opportunity fields, the block library, the rate card, prior proposals for that segment.
Decides	Which blocks apply, what the price should be, and whether anything in the draft is unapproved.
Produces	A draft document for review, with every block traceable to its source.
Stops when	Draft assembled and checks passed. A person sends it.
Tools it needs	Block library, rate card, document API.
Autonomy to start at	Approve. It does the work and stops before the irreversible step.

Optional: load a real model

Run it

The checks the draft has to pass

The model writes, then code checks. A draft that fails any check never reaches the send step, and the failure is shown rather than silently patched.

Check	What it protects against
No guarantee language	Words like guarantee, ensure, and eliminate turn a proposal into a contractual promise your delivery team never agreed to.
No competitor claims	Comparative claims about named competitors are a legal review item, not a sales flourish.
No invented percentages	A model will produce a 40% saving figure from nothing. Numbers come from the rate card and the case study library only.
Scope is stated	A summary with no scope produces a scope argument in month two.

Where this one goes wrong

Copy-paste from the wrong segment

An enterprise block in a small business proposal reads as a mismatch and kills trust. Filter blocks by segment, not by similarity.

Pricing drift

A model that writes prices instead of reading them will eventually write a wrong one. Prices come from a lookup, never from generation.

Unapproved claims

The single largest legal risk in sales automation, and the easiest to check for mechanically.

How you would know it is working

Measure	Why that one
Time to first proposal	Usually the point of the whole exercise.
Blocks edited before send	Which blocks always get rewritten? Fix those in the library, not in the agent.
Check failures caught	Every one is a claim that would have gone out. This is the number to show your legal team.

Earning more rope

Assist	Assemble a draft in a doc, the rep rewrites freely.
Approve	Assemble with pricing filled from the rate card, rep approves and sends.
Auto	Not appropriate. A proposal is a commercial commitment and always needs a named human.

Generate the prose, look up the numbers. Every serious document agent draws this line, and the ones that do not eventually send a wrong price to a customer.

Related: RFP splitting · Contract review · Guardrails · all agent jobs · Agent Lab home

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