How to draft quotes and proposals with AI without sending a bad price

A consultant who tracked about 40 proposals over six months says AI cut his writing time from roughly three hours to 40 to 50 minutes. He also lost a £4,200 job with a draft that had the right scope and the right numbers. The customer picked a pricier rival because that proposal "mentioned things we'd talked about," according to his own account.

That is the whole story of quotes and AI. It is fast. It is also easy to get wrong in ways that cost you the job, or worse, win you one at the wrong price.

Who this is for and what you need

This is for owners who write quotes, estimates or proposals themselves: a contractor, a landscaper, an agency, a cleaning company, a consultant. You need three things:

• A chat tool such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Start with whichever free tier you already have.
• Your own rate sheet, even if it is a messy spreadsheet.
• One or two past quotes that you were happy with, with the customer's details removed.

Plan on an hour for the first one, mostly spent on setup. After that, a quote should take a fraction of what it does now.

Decide what AI does and what you do

The split that works is simple. AI writes and formats. You decide the numbers.

The reason is how these tools behave. An agency writing on The Recursive in September puts it this way: without specific details, AI defaults to generic assumptions about a standard project. The result looks polished and authoritative while hiding assumptions nobody checked.

A fast document is not the same as an accurate one.

So the model never sets a price, a deadline or a warranty term. It can arrange them, word them clearly and catch gaps. It cannot know that your drywall supplier raised prices last month or that the customer's basement has a low ceiling.

Write your rules down first

Before you ask for a quote, give the tool a short set of rules, and keep it in a document you paste in each time. Include:

1. Your hourly rates and standard markups, in your own words.
2. The sections every quote has: scope, what is not included, price, timeline, payment terms, how long the quote is valid.
3. Your tone. "Plain, friendly, no jargon, short sentences" is enough.
4. One instruction that matters more than the rest: use only the figures I give you, and write [MISSING] wherever you would have guessed.

That last line does a lot of work. It turns an invented number into a visible blank you can fill in or ask about.

Feed it the job, not the customer

Now describe the job. Use your notes from the site visit or the call: what the customer wants, the measurements, the materials, the exceptions, the date they need it by.

Leave out the customer's name, phone number, address and anything else that identifies them. Canada's privacy regulators, in joint guidance issued in December 2023, advise organizations to avoid entering personal information into prompts unless it is necessary, and to use anonymized or de-identified data where it will do the job. The guidance is a set of principles that applies existing privacy law, including PIPEDA, to generative AI. It is not a new rule, but it is the standard a regulator would point to.

Write "the customer" and "the property." You add the real names in your own quote template afterwards.

Put the human details back in

This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that wins work.

AI tends to drop the small, specific things people say on a call. In the lost job above, the customer's worry was that the team was afraid to post after a director had been trolled. The AI reduced it to "internal reluctance." The rival kept the real detail.

His fix is worth copying:

1. Take notes by hand during the call: names, frustrations, dates, worries.
2. Let AI draft the scope, timeline and pricing layout.
3. Write two to four sentences yourself in the opening, using what the customer actually said.
4. Read the whole thing aloud. Cut or rewrite any sentence that could go to any customer in your trade.

This matters because customers notice. The Recursive article cites a survey of more than 660 tech readers in which more than three-quarters said they stop reading when they suspect AI wrote something. That is one narrow audience, so treat it as a warning, not a law.

Check every number before it leaves

Open your rate sheet next to the draft and check, line by line:

• Every quantity, unit price and total, including tax (HST in Ontario).
• Every date and the quote's expiry.
• Every promise: warranty, "includes cleanup," "no hidden fees."
• Every [MISSING] marker is gone.

If you wrote "fixed price," be extra careful. The agency behind The Recursive piece says it defaults to time and materials (billing for actual hours and costs) when a project's scope is not fully mapped. A fixed number on a loosely understood job is where an AI-written quote does the most damage, because a confident-looking figure is hard to walk back.

Common mistakes

• Pasting in the first draft. The consultant above also sent a customer a proposal with headers, flow and pricing tiers nearly identical to two others she had received that week. She said it felt like buying a template.
• Asking AI to price the job. It will answer, and the answer will look professional.
• Leaving out the "not included" section. Most disputes start there. Ask the tool to list what a customer might assume is covered, then decide what is in and out.
• Using customer data in the prompt. It is avoidable. Anonymize it.
• Expecting a big payoff. A survey of 1,000 Canadian business owners by Zensurance, published in September, found only 9% reported meaningful productivity gains or cost savings from AI, while 32% said it made little or no difference. The sample was self-selected, so it is a rough guide. Quoting is a good place to find a real saving, but measure it.

When not to use it

Skip AI for a bid that is a legal commitment, such as a large fixed-price contract or a tender with strict wording. Have the people who will deliver the work write the commitments, and have someone read the contract. For small jobs and routine proposals, AI is a fine first-draft tool.

Where to start

1. This week, write your rules page and rate sheet summary, and save them where you can paste them in.
2. Take your next ordinary quote and draft it with AI, with the "use only my figures" instruction. Time how long it takes against your usual way.
3. Check it against your rate sheet, add your own human details, and send it. Note whether the customer responds differently.

If you would rather have the quoting process set up once, properly, you can book a call with Trimotech.