Getting started with AutogenAI

The quickest way to learn AutogenAI is to take one opportunity through it. This article walks the route: find your way around, create a project, let the platform break the proposal down, then write. Follow the numbered steps and you'll be up to speed quickly.

Finding your way around

When you log in, you land on What are we working on today? — your starting point. Two buttons matter:

• New document opens the Workspace editor for a quick, private piece of work.
• Create new project launches the project setup wizard. This is where most proposals begin.

Below the buttons, Assigned Tasks lists the sections and documents you own, with status, due date and page limit at a glance — reassign one by selecting the assignee icon on any row. Recently Viewed sits underneath so you can pick up where you left off. At the bottom, Ask anything is the Research Assistant, for a quick question without opening a document.

Everything else hangs off the slim navigation bar down the left. From the top: Search, then Home, Workspace (your private documents — only you see them), Projects (every proposal you're working on), and the Knowledge Hub (your libraries, reusable material and Saved Prompts).

Create a project

The setup wizard is four short steps.

• Project name. Something the team will recognize at a glance.
• Upload RFP. The response or question document.
• Submission deadline. The date feeds your task list.
• Project library. Add supporting documents.

Steps two, three and four are all skippable. If the opportunity is real but the documents aren't out yet, create the project and start anyway — you can add the RFP later.

The habit that matters most on step two. Upload only the document or documents containing the questions or requirements you're responding to — not the whole tender pack. That keeps your outline clean and stops the platform from trying to work out which of 30 files is the response document. Everything else — schedules, addenda, reference material — goes into the Project Library, where it's still available whenever you need it.

Files process as they upload. Wait for the green File ready tick before moving on. Very large, table-heavy documents can struggle; if one won't process, split it into smaller parts.

What happens next. The platform reads your response document and starts generating a master response structure — one project section per question or requirement. You don't have to tell it whether you're dealing with questions or requirements; it works that out from the document.

The Project Hub and the three phases

Once the project exists it opens in the Project Hub. The left sidebar organizes the proposal into three phases, plus your Project Library and Project Admin.

• Pre-Proposal. Optional. Qualify the opportunity and build evidence before you commit.
• Prepare & Plan. The RFP is analyzed and your outline drafted.
• Write. Generate first drafts and refine your responses in the Editor.

You don't have to work through them in order. For a proposal already in flight, skip the first two and go straight to Write.

The phase names are a starting point. In Project Admin you can rename them to match the language your team already uses — Pre-Proposal to "Qualify", Write to "Drafting", or whatever your process calls them.

Your Project Library is a folder belonging to this project only. The RFP pack, anything you upload, and everything generated along the way all sit here. It doesn't sync back to your central library or SharePoint. Access is controlled at project level: add someone to the project and they can work with its library straight away, with no folder permissions to chase.

Pre-Proposal (optional)

This stage covers the work that used to happen in Word, email and spreadsheets weeks before the RFP arrived. Each activity you run becomes a document in the Project Library, and can then be used when your responses are written.

You'll see up to seven recommended activities: Conduct Competitor Analysis, Capture Plan, Opportunity Overview, Discriminator Analysis, Teaming Partner Overview, a Bid / No-Bid Gate Review Package, and a Capture Plan. Run the ones that help this proposal and skip the rest.

To run one:

1. On the activity card, click Start.
2. Select the files to use — from the Project Library, freshly uploaded files, or web links. For a competitor analysis you can switch web search on and point it at specific sites.
3. Click Next.
4. Add anything that should be treated as the final word, then click Create document.
5. The activity generates in the background and opens as a document you can refine.

That final context box is the highest-leverage thing you'll fill in. A line like "we are not partnering with X on this bid" or "focus on mitigating environmental impact" steers the whole output. Use it for the decisions and corrections your documents don't spell out.

Each activity card has an information icon explaining what to feed that specific activity. It's worth reading — the guidance differs for each one.

Where evidence is missing, an activity writes a placeholder telling you what to go and find, rather than inventing it. Treat those placeholders as a to-do list.

Prepare & Plan

This is where the proposal gets broken down, and most of it happens in the background once your RFP is in.

Your master response structure is built for you — the skeleton of your response, drawn from the uploaded documents. You can edit it before accepting, or build your own from scratch.

The analysis becomes documents you can reuse. An RFP Summary, Scoring Methodology, Compliance Checklist, Buyer's Expectations, Missing Information & Potential Risks, Potential Clarification Questions and more. Each opens as a proper document you can refine, query, pin, and select as a source when you write. Use the preview arrow to read one without opening it, and Export all to .docx to send a selection onward — your compliance checklist and forms list to legal, for example.

Set your win themes here, before you generate drafts. A clear view of the buyer's priorities and how you'll differentiate feeds every section that follows.

Make your corrections while you're still in this phase. Once the response structure and storyboards are generated, these planning documents lock for editing, so that the sections already built from them don't fall out of step.

Write

The Write phase runs in a clear order.

1. Approve your response structure. Write opens on the suggested structure. Drag to reorder, rename, add or remove sections, then click Approve as master response structure — or Build your own. The RFP documents panel on the right lets you check the source as you go.
2. Work from your sections. Each section has an owner, assignees, due date, word limit and live word count. Word limits populate automatically where they're found in the RFP. Switch between list and board views top-right.
3. Steer the section. Open a section and you're in the Editor with the Storyboard panel on the right. The Writer's Assignment holds the bid question and your limits; below it sit the Requirements, Contextual Notes, Evaluation Criteria and Win Themes, pulled from the RFP. This is where you give the brief, and it's where the work pays off — a well-steered section routinely turns a 50% first draft into an 80% one.
4. Generate the first draft. Typically one to five minutes. You can leave the page and come back.
5. Refine in the Editor. Text on the left, everything else in the right-hand panel. Select a passage to bring up Ask AI and the writing transformations — Expand, Summarize, Add Case Study, Add Statistics, Tone of voice. In Document Settings, switch on the A4 page view to see where content actually falls on a page. Document history rolls you back to an earlier version if an edit goes wrong.
6. Export. From the master response structure, use Quick Export for a Word document, or export using a template to keep your house style — a templated Word document, or Adobe InDesign for design-led submissions.

Working outside a project

Not everything is a proposal. New document on the Home page drops you into the Workspace editor for private work — research, a one-off summary, something you're not ready to share. The Assistant is in the right-hand panel there too.

Your first project

If you want a concrete way in, use a proposal you've already submitted. You know what good looked like, which makes it a fair test.

1. Create the project and upload just the question document.
2. Let the response structure generate, then read it against the outline you actually used.
3. Run a competitor analysis — it produces a strong output from the RFP and web search alone.
4. Open one section, fill in the storyboard properly, and generate a first draft.
5. Compare it with what you submitted.

Tips and notes

• Tip. You don't need to learn everything at once. Find the things you already do — upload the tender, get your outline, write your responses — then layer on the pre-proposal work once the core flow is second nature.
• Tip. The narrower your Source Providers, the more precise the answer. Pointing at a single project folder beats pointing at everything.
• Note. There's no amendment flow yet. If the buyer issues a revised RFP, either start a fresh project or use the assistant to pull out the differences and feed those in.
• Warning. You can't delete the RFP document from a Project Library — it would break the activities built from it.