Welcome to the Monday AI for ED Drop — a weekly series built for economic development professionals who want to use AI to do more, faster, without becoming a technology expert. Every Monday you'll get practical tips, workflows, and spotlights on the tools inside EconSquad AI that save real time on real work.
For Issue #1, we're starting at the beginning: your first week. Not theory — actual tasks to automate, a simple setup you can do in an hour, and the mindset shift that makes everything else work.
The 3 Tasks to Automate First
Most ED professionals spend a disproportionate amount of time on three categories of work: writing, data lookup, and email triage. These are exactly the areas where AI creates the fastest wins. Start here.
Grant Narrative First Drafts
Grant writing is the single highest-leverage task to hand off to AI — at least for first drafts. The structure of a grant narrative (needs statement, goals, activities, evaluation, budget justification) is highly formulaic. AI handles that formula well. Your job is to bring the community-specific data and the local political context that no AI can replicate. Start with your next grant: paste the RFP summary and your community data into EconSquad's Grant Writer specialist and ask for a first draft of the needs statement. You'll spend 30 minutes editing instead of 2 hours writing from scratch.
Site Selection RFI Responses
Every RFI asks for roughly the same data: available sites, buildings, workforce profile, utility infrastructure, incentives. But every RFI is formatted differently, asks questions in different order, and has a slightly different audience (a corporate real estate director, a site consultant, an in-house location team). AI can help you assemble a tailored, polished response in a fraction of the time. Keep a running "community data brief" document and paste it alongside the RFI into EconSquad's Site Selection specialist. The first response you build will take an hour. The fifth will take 15 minutes.
Inbox Triage and Response Drafting
The inbox is a time trap. EconSquad AI's inbox integration reads your Gmail and surfaces what actually needs your attention — prospect inquiries, urgent stakeholder notes, grant deadline reminders. For emails that need a thoughtful reply, the AI drafts a response you can review and send in under two minutes. This doesn't replace relationship-building communication. It eliminates the routine replies that eat 45 minutes of your morning before you've done anything strategic.
Getting Your Workflow Set Up
The setup takes about an hour and pays back that time in the first week. Here's the sequence:
- Connect your Google account. This unlocks Gmail integration and Google Calendar sync — you'll see your meetings and upcoming deadlines alongside your inbox without switching tabs.
- Build your community data document. One document with your key stats: population, unemployment, per capita income, top employers, major industries, available sites overview. You'll paste from this constantly. Keep it in Google Docs or Notion so it's easy to copy.
- Run one task end-to-end today. Don't experiment with everything at once. Pick the one task from the list above that would save you the most time this week and run it fully. First-week wins matter — they show you what's actually possible.
- Set your notification preferences. EconSquad AI's notification bell surfaces calendar reminders, grant deadlines from your inbox, and new weekly Drop issues. Spend two minutes in settings so you're seeing what's relevant.
Meet Riley — Your Grant Writer
Riley is EconSquad's Grant Writer specialist, trained specifically on the structure, language, and priorities of economic development grants — EDA programs, CDBG, state revolving funds, workforce development grants, and more.
Riley doesn't just write sentences — she writes grant language. Needs statements that use the right framing for a federal audience. Goals that map to statutory priorities. Evaluation sections that reviewers recognize as credible. The output reads like it was written by someone who has written federal grants before, because the model was trained on exactly that.
Start with a needs statement: give Riley your community data brief and the RFP's stated priorities. Ask for a 400-word needs statement that connects local conditions to the program's goals. Edit, sharpen, make it yours — but you'll start from something solid instead of a blank page.
"I was skeptical that AI could actually write grant language that felt real. The first draft Riley gave me needed editing, but it got me 70% there in five minutes. That used to take me two hours."
The Mindset That Makes It Work
The most common mistake in the first week: treating AI like a search engine. You ask a question, you get an answer, you evaluate it as right or wrong. That framing makes AI frustrating.
Better framing: AI is a draft machine. Its job is to get you from zero to a starting point quickly. Your job is to bring judgment, local knowledge, and relationship context that no AI has. The goal isn't a perfect AI output — it's a faster path to a good final product.
With that framing, a draft that's 70% right isn't a failure — it's 30 minutes of editing instead of 2 hours of writing. That's the win.
Start your first week today.
EconSquad AI is free to try — no credit card, no commitment. Connect your Google account and run your first task in under 20 minutes.
Start Free Trial →See you next Monday. Next week: Grant Season Survival Guide — how to scan RFPs fast, build a reusable data library, and draft a full narrative in two hours.