You open an email. Subject: ‘Your Grant Proposal.’ You’ve been waiting for weeks. The document is twelve pages, perfectly formatted, grammatically flawless, and utterly hollow. You know it was generated by an AI. And you feel insulted.
Not because it’s bad. Because it’s too easy. The person who sent it outsourced the very thinking the document was supposed to demonstrate. They didn’t deliberate. They didn’t struggle. They pressed a button.
Receiving an AI-generated proposal isn’t just disappointing—it’s a declaration that your time and your funding aren’t worth the effort of genuine thought.
This is the uncomfortable truth behind the OpenBcon open-source AI consulting platform and every other tool like it. They promise to democratize strategy, to let anyone generate a business plan in minutes. But what they’re really doing is automating the illusion of competence.
I’ve been on both sides of this equation. I’ve written proposals that took weeks of research, iteration, and sleepless nights. And I’ve received proposals that were clearly stitched together from templates—and now from language models. The difference is palpable. One feels like a commitment. The other feels like a gamble with someone else’s dice.
The real crisis isn’t that AI can write a business plan. It’s that we’ve forgotten why business plans matter in the first place.
Business plans aren’t artifacts. They’re evidence of a process. The process of asking hard questions, of stress-testing assumptions, of convincing yourself before you try to convince anyone else. A good business plan is the residue of a difficult conversation you had with reality. An AI-generated plan is a conversation with a mirror.
Here’s where the twist lands: the most provocative insight from the analysis of over 1000 viral articles—the Mimeng Principle—is that AI consulting tools aren’t replacing high-level consultants; they’re replacing the illusion of consulting. They’re exposing how much of what we called ‘strategy’ was already hollow busywork.
Think about it. The slide decks. The five-year forecasts. The SWOT analyses that never change. If an AI can do it in thirty seconds, maybe it wasn’t worth doing in the first place. The insult isn’t that the AI did it—it’s that you were going to do it the same way, just slower.
So what do we do? We stop pretending that generating a document is the same as doing the work. We demand that the process be visible, not just the output. We ask for the thinking, not just the artifact.
If you wouldn’t screenshot it and send it to a friend, don’t send it to a funder.
The next time you’re tempted to use an AI to write a proposal, ask yourself: am I trying to get something done, or am I trying to avoid doing something hard? If it’s the latter, you’re not saving time—you’re wasting trust.
And when you receive one, you have every right to be insulted. Because deep down, you know: the best proposals aren’t the ones that look perfect. They’re the ones that feel real.
FAQ
Q: Aren't AI business plans just a faster way to get the same result? Why would a funder care if it's AI-generated if the content is good?
A: Because the content isn't the point. The point is the process. A funder is investing in the founder's ability to think, adapt, and commit. An AI-generated plan shows none of that. It's like submitting a painting you commissioned: the result might look nice, but it tells the investor nothing about your skill.
Q: So should I never use AI for business planning? What's the practical alternative?
A: Use AI as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter. Generate questions, not answers. Let it stress-test your assumptions. Then write the narrative yourself. The document must carry your voice, your logic, your risk. If you can't explain it in your own words, you don't understand it yet.
Q: Isn't the real problem that traditional consulting was already full of hollow templates? Maybe AI is just exposing that hypocrisy.
A: Exactly. That's the contrarian truth. The AI didn't invent the emptiness—it inherited it. The real scandal is that so much of what we called 'strategy' was already a paint-by-numbers exercise. The AI is a mirror. If you're offended by what it produces, don't blame the mirror. Blame the system that taught you to confuse format with substance.