The Proposal That Changed Everything

April 2023. I’m sitting in front of a 60-page RFP from one of Australia’s biggest online retailers.

Major logistics tender. The kind of submission that takes a team three weeks and a few heated arguments to get right. Inbound operations, outbound fulfillment, inventory control, SLAs, pricing models, account management structures. Sixty pages of “prove you can handle our business.”

Except I was doing it alone.

No tender writing team. No legal to review the language. No framework, no precedent, no one who’d done this before at this company, because this company had only been in Australia for eighteen months. There was no Australian website. No formal processes. We’d basically just arrived. And here I was, representing us in a national tender against established players who had the full infrastructure behind them.

I’d been hearing about ChatGPT. Half the office thought it was a toy. The other half hadn’t bothered to find out.

That night I stopped hearing about it and started using it.

Section by section I fed it the brief. Requirements, scope, SLAs, account structures. Then I started asking it to write. Not to see what it could do. I needed help. There was too much, moving too fast, and not enough hands.

It didn’t produce filler. It held the whole document in its head. It understood context. It helped me structure the team’s workload, frame our strengths against their specific requirements, and turn rough notes into submission-quality copy. In real time. By myself. In a company that had no playbook for this.

We submitted a 60-page proposal for a major national account. Representing a company with no Australian track record, no website, no support structure behind me. Just the work.

We didn’t win. Honestly, I don’t think the tender was ever really meant to be won by anyone new. Most big tenders like that are a pricing exercise, a way to put pressure on whoever’s already got the contract. The incumbent held on.

But the feedback came back: “You were definitely our next pick.”

Not bad for a company that didn’t have shit.

I didn’t sleep much that night. But it wasn’t stress keeping me up. It was the kind of wired you get when you realise something just shifted and there’s no going back.

One person. One tool. No team, no framework, no safety net. A submission that competed at the highest level.

I stopped asking what AI could do.

I already knew.