Over the last year, one complaint has been repeated again and again across the charity and funding sector:
“AI has caused a surge in grant applications.”
That statement is true.
But it’s also misleading.
AI hasn’t broken the grant funding system. It has simply revealed problems that have existed for decades.
Grant Funding Has Never Been Fair or Accessible
For the last 5, 10, 15, even 20 years, grant funding in the UK has been effectively out of reach for a large proportion of organisations.
To access funding, charities have typically needed at least one of three things:
- Time: hours spent researching funders, interpreting guidance, and drafting applications
- Expertise: specialist knowledge of how to write applications that meet funder expectations
- Money: the ability to pay a freelancer £300–£600 per day to do it for them
If you didn’t have at least one of these, you were largely locked out.
Small charities.
Grassroots organisations.
Community groups.
Volunteer-led organisations.
Not because their work wasn’t valuable, but because the system wasn’t designed with them in mind.
Grant funding has never been truly accessible. It has just taken AI for us to finally acknowledge it.
The Pressure Has Been Building for Years
It’s also important to be clear about something else.
The rise in grant applications didn’t start with AI.
Charities are operating under unprecedented pressure:
- Rising costs driven by the cost-of-living crisis
- Reduced public funding and shrinking local authority budgets
- Increased demand for frontline services
- Less unrestricted income and fewer reserves
More organisations are being pushed towards grant funding not because it’s easy, but because they have no other option.
AI hasn’t created that demand. It has simply arrived at a moment when more charities need funding to survive.
What AI Has Actually Done
AI hasn’t gamed the system. It has removed artificial barriers.
It gives organisations:
- Time, by automating research and drafting
- Expertise, by guiding structure, tone, and compliance
- Confidence, by demystifying a process that has always been opaque
For the first time, many organisations that were previously excluded can apply.
So yes, application numbers have increased.
But that doesn’t mean AI is the problem. It means funding was being rationed through inefficiency and inequality.
The Bid Writer Role Isn’t Disappearing. It’s Changing.
None of this makes bid writers redundant.
It changes where their value sits.
AI reduces time spent on repetitive drafting and admin-heavy tasks, freeing skilled professionals to focus on higher-value work such as:
- Building and maintaining relationships with funders
- Shaping funding strategies, not just applications
- Strengthening project design and outcomes
- Keeping core documents, policies, and data up to date
- Supporting impact measurement and reporting
- Helping organisations become more funder-ready over time
This shift doesn’t reduce quality. It improves it.
Expertise moves upstream, where it has far more impact.
This Is About Equal Access, Not Application Volume
At its core, this conversation isn’t really about AI.
It’s about access.
Grant funding has never been a level playing field. Success has often depended less on impact or need, and more on an organisation’s ability to navigate an overly complex system.
That feels uncomfortably close to gatekeeping.
Two organisations delivering the same outcomes should not have wildly different chances of securing funding simply because one can afford professional bid writing support and the other can’t. A volunteer-led community group shouldn’t be excluded because it lacks the time or technical knowledge to interpret opaque processes.
Fair doesn’t mean everyone gets funded.
It means everyone gets a genuine opportunity to be considered.
AI hasn’t given charities an unfair advantage. It has removed disadvantages that should never have existed in the first place.
Application Volume Is the Outcome, Not the Root Cause
When funders say they’re overwhelmed by application volumes, they’re describing a real and serious pressure point.
What that pressure reveals is that many grant processes were never designed to operate at scale or to support broad, equitable access. They worked when volumes were lower and access was limited.
As AI reduces barriers and enables more organisations to apply, those underlying inefficiencies become harder to ignore.
The increase in applications isn’t misuse. It’s the predictable outcome of a system built for scarcity rather than inclusion.
Without better infrastructure, that model simply isn’t sustainable.
AI Tools Help, But They Don’t Fix the System
Tools like our own AI bid writing platform are powerful. They save time, reduce cost, and open access for organisations that were previously locked out.
But they aren’t the end solution.
They help charities navigate a broken system. They don’t repair it.
To truly fix the problem, we need to rethink how funding is distributed, not just how applications are written.
The Real Problem: We Don’t Have Infrastructure
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Grant funding still operates like it’s 1995.
In almost every other context, discovery works like this:
- Want to find a freelancer? Upwork
- Want to find a house? Rightmove
- Want to hire an employee? Indeed
- Want to find a service provider? Trustpilot
- Want to find a software tool? G2
These platforms didn’t remove due diligence. They standardised discovery.
Suppliers list information once. Buyers search, filter, compare, and match.
Now ask yourself:
If you’re a funder trying to find charities aligned to your mission, geography, or outcomes, where does that happen?
There is no equivalent infrastructure.
Instead, funders are expected to:
- Manually advertise opportunities
- Read hundreds or thousands of near-identical applications
- Make decisions using inconsistent, incomplete data
- Monitor impact through fragmented reporting
It’s slow. It’s expensive. And it breaks at scale.
AI Didn’t Break the System. It Forced the Conversation.
AI has done one crucial thing.
It has made it impossible to ignore how inefficient and inaccessible grant funding really is.
We now have two choices:
- Blame AI and restrict access again, recreating the same unfair barriers
- Build proper infrastructure that allows funding to move efficiently, transparently, and at scale
Only one of those leads to a healthier sector.
What We’re Building
This is the thinking behind our new Funding Portal.
We don’t need fewer applications. We need better systems.
Funders should be able to:
- Instantly see charities aligned to their mission
- Filter by geography, cause, size, and impact
- Match with organisations based on real data, not form-filling ability
- Distribute funding more efficiently
- Monitor outcomes without chasing reports
- Spend less time administering and more time funding
Charities shouldn’t have to fight for access. Funders shouldn’t have to drown in paperwork.
Funding Shouldn’t Live in Silos
A big part of the problem is duplication.
Charities are asked to explain who they are, what they do, and the impact they create over and over again, across different systems:
Grant portals
Crowdfunding platforms
CSR and corporate giving tools
Reporting and monitoring frameworks
It’s the same information, rewritten endlessly in slightly different formats.
Our vision is to create infrastructure where charities can maintain a single, up-to-date profile that reflects their work, outcomes, and needs, and then use that information across multiple funding routes.
Not just grants.
The goal isn’t to replace every platform. It’s to connect them.
Charities should be able to share their information once and have it work everywhere, rather than being forced to start from scratch each time they look for funding.
If you have thoughts on how this could work or if you are a funder and would like to be involved in the early pilots of this then please get in touch.
