Impact

4-6 hours

Saved per proposal through automation and faster content creation

<4 weeks

From kickoff to deployed marketing assistant with six guided topics

Higher proposal volume

Without adding headcount, with a trusted foundation for broader AI adoption

Saving 4-6 hours per proposal with a marketing AI copilot

Challenge

A regulated environmental consulting firm had a board-level question on the table: where, if anywhere, could AI deliver real value, and how could the firm prove it without taking on risk that its technical staff and compliance posture would not tolerate. Prior to this initiative, AI adoption inside the firm sat at 0%.

Leadership saw the potential, but skepticism ran high, particularly among technical staff who understood the cost of hallucinations and inaccuracies in a highly regulated environment. The firm needed a low-risk way to introduce AI that respected existing expertise and quality assurance processes while delivering measurable business value, ideally something concrete enough to settle the internal debate and unlock broader investment.

Solution

OneSix partnered with the firm to deploy a Microsoft Copilot Agent for the marketing team, the function with the highest concentration of structured, repeatable content work and the lowest exposure to regulated client deliverables. The result was a deliberate low-risk first move, designed to produce a measurable win in weeks rather than quarters.

The agent was grounded in SharePoint-hosted curated content and structured around guided workflows for proposal content generation, RFP analysis with pursue and no-pursue recommendations, resume creation, and writing LLM-generated content directly into Microsoft Word templates. The system was built to support human expertise rather than replace it, preserving the qualifying review steps the firm depends on.

In production, the marketing assistant saves an estimated four to six hours per proposal through automation and faster content creation, enabling higher proposal volume without adding headcount. More important for the firm's broader trajectory, it served as the first sanctioned AI use case inside the organization, moving adoption from 0% to a working foundation and giving leadership a credible reference point for the next round of AI investment.