17 years of bid writing. Now done by AI Agents, Jake built himself.
€1m grant secured. £700k Innovate UK award. 77% win rate. 32–40 hours saved per proposal.
This is what happens when deep domain expertise meets the right platform.
17 years writing R&D grants and public sector bids.
Built his own AI Agents on Maybe* to handle document-heavy front-end work. Now helps other businesses operate AI in the same way in their own fields.
“In an ideal world, for every bid you would have the full four-week timescale to go through the process step by step. In reality, that timescale gets squeezed. And when it does, it is some of the most time-consuming strategic elements that end up being missed out.”
Jake Wells CEO, JMJW Consulting
Key Challenges Before Maybe*
Jake Wells spent 17 years writing R&D grants and public sector bids for clients. He understood the work deeply. He also understood exactly where time was being lost, where quality was being compromised, and what it would take to fix it.
He built AI agents on the Maybe* platform to solve it. The time he got back is now spent helping other businesses do exactly the same thing in their own fields.
The problem Jake knew from the inside
Bid and grant writing is one of the most information-dense professional disciplines. A single public sector tender can involve 20+ documents, all of which need to be absorbed and a meticulous submission checklist prepared, before a single word of the response is written. The process has clear stages: research, buyer analysis, structured response templates, first draft, review, upload, and submission. Each stage matters. Each one takes time.
The reality is that the timescale is almost always compressed. And when it is, the most important stages at the start get squeezed first.
“The ability to have a colleague in effect is how it functions and how it feels. One who has read all of the documents, who can answer all of the questions as you go through the process.”
Jake Wells CEO, JMJW Consulting
Document overload before every bid
Absorbing 20+ tender documents is the most time-consuming part of the process. It is also where shortcuts are most likely, and where missing something costs the most this process solves exactely this challenge:
Manual research, eating, writing time
Understanding the buyer, finding board meeting minutes, and identifying priorities. All done manually. All taking time away from crafting the pitch that actually wins
The urgent overrules the important
Admin,form-filling and checklists consume the calendar. The strategic, creative work that makes a bid competitive gets whatever time is left. Which is rarely enough.
Quality squeezed at the end
Reviews happen too late. Writers get less feedback than they should. Submissions go out the day before the deadline, when they should go out a week before.
The agents Jake built with Maybe*
Jake used the Maybe* platform to build AI agents that addressed exactly the problem he had spent 17 years living with. The agents absorb all the tender documents, research the buyer, and handle the front-end stages of the process that consume the most time. Jake gets that time back to apply the expertise and creativity that cannot be replicated.
DOCUMENT INTELLIGENCE - Every document is absorbed instantly
All tender documentation read and understood from the start. Any question about any document is answered instantly, at any point in the process.BUYER RESEARCH - Automated authority research
Manual searches through council websites and board minutes done automatically. Salient details distilled and ready to apply to the pitch.RESEARCH BUILDER - Structured around how bid writers actually work
The agents follow the logical stages of bid management. Custom agents built for specific applications. The process stays intact. The time cost does not.DATA SECURITY - Each client's data is completely isolated
Confidential tender information is kept in a completely separate, secure environment. No data shared. No client content was used to train the wider model.
“Our experienced writers and consultants can spend more of their time on the strategic, quality-focused elements of the process. The agents handle the research, the re-reading of call text and specifications, and the early drafts.”
Jake Wells
Results in the last six months
These are not projections. They are outcomes from the last six months of using the agents across the bid and grants team.
€1m grant secured - Horizon Europe CSA project, in partnership with a leading UK university. One of the most competitive funding programmes in Europe.
£700k Innovate UK grant awarded - Secured under the Investor Partnership Programme. Complex application requirements are handled correctly through the full process. This was not only a winner, but Jake’s team wrote it in less than a week, thanks to Maybe*.
77% success rate on public sector bids - Based on 9 bids submitted in the last six months. Of the remaining bids, one scored 91% in evaluation. One result is still pending.
32 to 40 hours saved per proposal - A typical proposal takes around 160 hours of effort over its lifetime. The agents deliver a 20 to 25% efficiency gain per project, freeing experienced writers to focus on the strategic work that wins.
The agents gave Jake back time.
What he did with that time turned
out to be the bigger story.
What the time made possible
Building AI agents on the Maybe* platform taught Jake something that years of using generic AI tools had not. When deep domain expertise meets the right platform, the result is not just faster work. It is a fundamentally different way of working.
The constraint was never the knowledge. It was always the time.
With that time recovered, Jake now uses it to help other businesses understand and apply the same principle in their own fields. Working alongside the Maybe* team, he brings something most AI consultants cannot: the experience of having actually built AI Agents in a specialist domain under real deadline pressure, delivering measurable outcomes with Maybe*, providing a consistent, secure and reliable AI Infrastructure.
Please talk to us, and we can connect you to Jake if you would like his perspective on how to get AI to work for your business.
“AI won’t take your job. But somebody using AI probably will. The question is whether you have the right expertise and the right platform working together.”
Jake Wells CEO, JMJW Consulting
