No longer just simple prompts, but fully customised AI Assistants. Today, writing a European project with Artificial Intelligence means working with real “virtual colleagues” that accompany the entire creative process, understand the context, retain stylistic choices and proactively suggest solutions — almost as a human professional would. They also make far fewer errors and do not produce “hallucinations”. In short, a much more reliable system, provided it is well programmed.
A customised AI Assistant can be created on various platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and many others, each offering specific tools to shape the assistant’s behaviour, expand its knowledge and adapt it to the needs of a project. In practice, creating a personalised AI Assistant is not difficult, but it requires method and experience in handling AI. You start by defining the assistant’s purpose (for example: drafting projects, analysing texts, supporting creativity, offering technical advice). Then you access the AI platform and use the feature dedicated to creating a new assistant. Here, you enter the main instructions defining its character, tone, style and the type of tasks it will perform. It is essential to upload documents such as calls for proposals, guidelines, EU project design manuals, previously funded projects and any other useful material to ensure the assistant understands (and learns) the content it will be working on. Once everything is set, the assistant becomes immediately operational, ready to collaborate like a true virtual colleague.
For those working across different programmes (Horizon Europe, Erasmus+, Life, Creative Europe…) or multiple calls, a separate virtual Assistant is needed for each one. But the “top” customised Assistant is the one that evaluates your project before submission. Like all virtual assistants, the project-evaluation assistant must be properly programmed. This cannot be improvised. Otherwise, it will simply agree with everything you say (and approve your project), just like simple prompts do.
This is why the profession of the EU project designer has changed: today, one must know how to use AI effectively and how to create customised AI Assistants that support the project manager in preparing European project proposals. Associations, NGOs, public and private bodies, Chambers of Commerce and universities are now organising themselves to integrate these new skills and make the most of the potential of Artificial Intelligence in European project design.