Building Your Knowledge Base in Awarded AI

In this guide

Awarded AI works a little differently from the public AI tools you may be used to, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. The most important thing to understand is this: Awarded AI is a non-training model. For security and functional reasons, it does not retain or remember information across sessions. Every new chat begins with a clean slate, with no company or user data carried over from your previous chats.

That is a good thing for security, but it means the AI does not automatically know who you are, what you have won, or how you like your proposals written. Your Knowledge Base is the workaround. It is a repository of information you build once so you can feed it to the AI quickly, at the start of any session, without pasting the same details over and over.

📌 The big idea: The Knowledge Base is your company's long-term memory. Anything you find yourself repeating to the AI, whether it is your CAGE code, a past project, or a writing rule, belongs here so you only have to say it once.

You will run into these words all over Awarded AI, so here is what each one actually means.

Inside a Knowledge Category, information is organized into nodes. A category can hold as many nodes as you want, and each node can have its own sub-nodes beneath it. It is a simple parent-and-child structure:

You get to decide how deep to go. For past performance, some people keep it flat with one node per project. Others create a main node per project and place the write-up as a sub-node. Both are fine. Choose whatever will be easiest for you and your team to scan later.

This is the single most useful thing to know about building nodes quickly, and it catches everyone off guard the first time. In Awarded AI, the semicolon is a reserved character. Its only job (as far as the Knowledge Base goes) is to separate one node from the next.

When you type text into a node field and then click anywhere else on the page, Awarded AI splits your text at every semicolon and turns each chunk into its own separate node. Type A;B;C into a single field, click away, and you instantly get three nodes: A, B, and C. **You can easily test this out to ensure you understand the concept!

💡 Why this is powerful: If you already have your information somewhere else, like a spreadsheet, you can have the AI format all of it as one block with a semicolon between each entry. Then you paste the whole thing into a single node field once, and every entry auto-splits into its own node. No copying and pasting entries one at a time.

Because the semicolon is reserved for splitting, there is one rule you have to follow so it doesn't backfire:

⚠️ Important: Never use a semicolon inside a node's own text as punctuation. If you do, the AI will split that node in the wrong place. When you need a semicolon grammatically within an entry, use a pipe | or other delimiter instead.

Semicolons create new nodes.

Your Company Profile is the first default category (**the other default category that's editable: Past Performance), and it should already be mostly filled out when you first log in, pulled from publicly available sources about your company. Your job is to review it for accuracy and fill in anything missing. This is an incredibly crucial step because a comprehensive, current Company Profile directly feeds Awarded AI's content creation and its automated opportunity fit scoring (via the Bid Search).

Add anything you would want the AI to know about your company, including:

If something you need is not covered by the existing fields, scroll to the bottom of the profile and add a custom field. The more complete the profile, the better the AI performs.

Past Performances is the other default editable category worth building out early, and here is the key reason: along with your Company Profile, Past Performances is one of only two categories that feed the automated opportunity fit scoring in Bid Search. Other categories you create will not. So even if you are not focused on the pipeline yet, getting this one in good shape pays off later.

Unlike the Company Profile, this category is not pre-filled, so you will populate it yourself. The good news is the AI can help avoid some of that manual labor! We created a prompt that does most of the heavy lifting.

🔎 You can find this prompt in the Crawl Training Companion Word Document, which you automatically receive if you have attended a live Crawl training (run live as a webinar the first Tuesday of each month - register here!); or you can ask your CSM for it, and they can either send it to you or add it to your Prompts library directly in Awarded.

💡 Tip: The default prompt is set to process proposals one at a time and pause for your review. That is a safety feature, not a limitation. If you would rather batch several at once, you can edit the prompt to say so. And always read the output before you save it, to make sure it captured everything you want the AI to know.

💡 Another Tip: If you want to edit the prompt to reflect your unique dataset/situation, give the AI the original prompt, tell it you want to edit it, and tell it HOW you want to edit it. Then ask it to revise the prompt for you!

💡 Already have a spreadsheet where you have all your past performance data/details saved? Even easier. If your past performance already lives in a spreadsheet, you can adapt the prompt to extract every row verbatim, label each piece with its column name, and separate each row with a semicolon. Attach the spreadsheet, run it, then paste the result straight into your category. Every row becomes its own node in one paste. It will not look pretty in the field, and that's fine (though admittedly difficult for us Type-As). The AI only needs the raw data, not tidy formatting.

Once your two defaults are solid, create new categories for anything else the AI should know. A good rule of thumb: create a category for information you find yourself repeating. Specifically, make a new category for anything you:

📌 The Preferences category is a favorite. A "Preferences" or "Rules" category is one of the highest value things you can build. It is where you tell the AI your writing rules once and reuse them forever; for example, a rule to avoid the em dash, a rule to write in formal narrative prose rather than bullet lists, or a rule to always cite the source file when pulling facts and to never make anything up or hallucinate. The Companion document includes ready-to-use examples you can adapt.

Building your Knowledge Base is only half the job. The AI still needs to know which knowledge to use in a given session. That is what the Sources Panel does. A configuration is simply the combination of categories and nodes you have toggled on. You can toggle a whole category on or off and use the Configure button to select or deselect individual nodes within it.

The one you will use most is your default configuration, the set of toggles that turns on automatically every time you log in and start a new session. Setting it up means the AI always opens with a baseline of knowledge about your company.

⚠️ Heads up, this is per user. There is no admin who can set one default configuration for everyone. Each user sets up their own. If you want your whole team working from the same baseline, align on it internally and have everyone toggle on the same categories.

If you are the person responsible for your organization's Knowledge Base, here are a couple of tips to help you build it out and maintain it over time.

Before you create categories, think about how your users will look for information later, then structure your categories so they can find it efficiently. A little planning up front saves a lot of hunting down the road.

Have one person own keeping the Knowledge Base accurate and current. Review it on a regular cadence to remove anything outdated and add what is new. A simple way to get started: hold an internal meeting, align on what belongs in the Knowledge Base, assign categories to different people to populate, then come back together to review.

💡 You have PSci support available to you! Your CSM is in Awarded AI every day and is happy to help you complete your profile, build out categories, and refine your prompts. You can also use the live chat inside the app anytime, or email [email protected].

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