By Meghan Jacobsen, Grants Development Associate, and Ashley Schultz, Manager of Community Engagement
Every grantseeker knows the value of a good toolbelt - filled with resources like checklists, proposal templates, and budget spreadsheets that make an arduous process more manageable. Today, the newest and most talked-about addition is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Grantmakers, grantwriters, and funding consultants are increasingly using AI to streamline their processes. The U.S. government's own Grants.gov portal now offers AI-powered recommendations, while dozens of private companies have launched tools that claim to revolutionize or transform the process of generating proposal language with AI.
But just like any tool, AI's effectiveness depends on how - and when - you use it. A hammer can help you build a wall, but it cannot design the whole house. When it comes to the critical work of strategy and vision, that’s where human expertise still matters most.
Adding AI to your Toolbelt
At Grants Office, we have spent time working with AI ourselves and have seen dozens of public sector organizations across the US deploying it. We have come to think of AI as a powerful tool whose true benefit is to speed up the work you are already doing. For example,
- Streamlining Research: AI can quickly summarize a dense, 50-page Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) or a funder’s lengthy 990 tax form - pulling out key deadlines, eligibility requirements, and funding priorities. This gives you the essentials without hours of sifting through exceedingly long files.
- Improving Drafts: Large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can function like a trusted editor. They can help polish your drafts by turning rough language into flowing prose, suggesting alternative phrasing to improve clarity, or helping to reformat complex information into easy-to-read tables.
- Automating Functions: AI can take on repetitive but necessary tasks within the grant writing process. Some tools can scan a proposal to check for compliance with formatting rules, while others can transcribe and summarize virtual planning sessions for you to distribute to your collaborators - freeing you up to focus on more strategic and imaginative content.
Used in these ways, AI gives you a greater opportunity to focus on project design questions on your plate. It is important to remember, however, that even the most advanced power tool is only as effective as the person who wields it.
Remembering that Humans Still Carry the Toolbelt
AI tools may be shiny and powerful, but the foundational labor of grantseeking - conceiving a project, setting goals, envisioning outcomes, and rolling up some shirt sleeves to make it all happen – each remains as uniquely human endeavors. Relying too heavily on AI is like constructing a house that looks great from the street but lacks a solid foundation and the personal touches that make it a home. For example,
- Context: AI cannot grasp the specific history of your organization, the unique needs of your community, or the subtle priorities of a potential funder. Grantmakers look for proposals that demonstrate a deep understanding of their mission. Generic, AI-generated narratives that lack such specific context are often the first to be set aside.
- Accuracy: AI models frequently generate plausible but incorrect information by pulling from unreliable sources across the web. Submitting proposals that contain factual errors or outdated data signals a lack of thoroughness to grantmakers and can quickly disqualify otherwise promising projects.
- Privacy and Security: Public AI platforms do not guarantee the confidentiality of the data you provide and may use it for their own training purposes. This stands in stark contrast to the confidentiality expected when working with grantmakers, who oversee all proposal details with discretion, particularly applications containing sensitive research and development details.
So, if you will allow us to keep going with the tool metaphors, AI may help you tighten the bolts, but humans still need to design the blueprint and bring the project to life.
Listening to the Grantmakers
To date, the U.S. government has not issued a blanket policy for all agencies on the use of AI tools in grantseeking efforts, although some key funders have issued their own guidance, including:
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) - The NIH released a notice in July 2025 that it will not consider proposals to be "original ideas of the applicant" if they are "substantially developed by AI, or contain sections substantially developed by AI." The funder notes that they may act, including disallowing costs and/or withholding future awards, if their AI-detection software discovers misconduct.
- National Science Foundation (NSF) – The NSF issued a similar notice to the research community in December 2023 to remind applicants they remain responsible for the “accuracy and authenticity of their proposal” should they submit content developed with the assistance of generative AI tools. Differing from the NIH’s policy, the NSF encourages applicants to highlight where and how AI was leveraged to develop their proposal with their submission, so reviewers are aware.
- S. Department of Energy – Outside of the research community, the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) is one of the few federal agencies to issue direct guidance to its grantseekers on the use of AI tools, being so direct as to include the callout - "Do not use verbatim text from a generative AI chatbot - these are not your words."
Beyond these few outspoken agencies, most grantmakers are moving forward with a cautiously optimistic outlook on AI-enabled grantseeking – viewing these new technologies as a potential tool to increase efficiency and enhance the accessibility of funding, while reminding applicants that the ultimate responsibility for accuracy, originality, and ethics of any AI-use falls squarely on their shoulders.
Grants Office’s AI Policy: Choosing the Right Tools
Over the past nine months, the Grants Office team joined these grantmakers and our fellow grantseekers by asking important questions about our own usage of artificial intelligence. What tools were we using? Which of those use cases did we find most helpful? And where are our proverbial lines in the sand – what aspects of the grantseeking process did we believe need to remain human?
We were collectively pleased to see that the resulting conversations underpinned the inherently human component of grantseeking. While our team does leverage AI to support internal research, summarize information, and improve our processes, we agreed that those tools could not, and should not, replace our own human judgment, expertise, or oversight.
A full text of our resulting AI Use and Governance Policy can be found on our website. This document outlines key principles that guide our use of AI in all we do, including –
- Integrity – We do not use AI to create original content. We also do not use AI to fabricate or infer grant opportunities. A human grants professional prepares every resource published by Grants Office using publicly available sources. We do not support the use of AI for plagiarism or misrepresentation.
- Human Oversight – We review and verify all internal research and summaries created with AI tools before any data they provide is included in our published materials. This process includes carefully cross-referencing results with primary and secondary sources to ensure the accuracy, validity, and contextual appropriateness of an AI tool’s outputs.
- Privacy and Security – We never use AI tools on proprietary, confidential, client-specific, or otherwise sensitive data.
If you have read our FUNDED® articles, attended our Grantscasts®, or worked with our team on grant applications, we hope these policies are not surprising. For 25 years, our commitment to accuracy, transparency, and trust has guided how we understand the funding landscape and how we assist our clients & partners through the grant application process.
Building for the Future
Taking a cue from the NSF, the Grants Office team designed a brand-new badge to accompany content that had a human grant professional firmly at the helm for the critical thinking, conceptualization, and writing stages of its development. This marker will appear across FUNDED® articles, Grantscast® events, guides, and reviews to show that while AI may have been in our toolbox, a human on our team carried the toolbelt.
We encourage you to watch for this badge on future Grants Office content and use it as a reminder of the inherently human component of this work. AI tools might help you build the walls and sand down the rough edges, but grantmakers are still looking for the complete, structurally sound home: a project built on a strong foundation of genuine vision, realistic goals, and a palpable impact on the surrounding community.