Grants Management with AI: From Decrees to Justification

Public grants are one of the most important instruments available to administrations for driving social, economic, and cultural policy. But they are also among the most labor-intensive administrative processes.

From the publication of the call for proposals to the final expenditure justification, technical teams manage a constant flow of documentation that demands precision, regulatory coherence, and strict deadlines. Artificial intelligence offers concrete solutions for each phase of this cycle.

The grants cycle: where AI steps in

Generating award decrees

Drafting grant award decrees is a repetitive task that nonetheless requires legal rigor. Each decree must include the correct legal foundations, call conditions, justification deadlines, available resources, and beneficiary obligations.

Specialized AI systems can generate draft decrees from case file data and the call's terms of reference. The officer reviews, adjusts, and validates — but starts from a structured, coherent document rather than a blank page.

The advantages are clear:

• Over 50% reduction in drafting time.
• Consistency across decrees within the same call.
• Lower probability of omissions or formal errors.
• Templates adaptable to different grant types.

Reviewing justifications

The justification phase is arguably the most costly in time and effort. Beneficiaries submit invoices, reports, certificates, and other documents that officers must verify one by one.

AI can automate much of this process:

• Document classification: Automatically identifying each document type (invoice, certificate, report...).
• Data extraction: Obtaining amounts, dates, concepts, and suppliers from invoices.
• Coherence verification: Checking that submitted expenses match the approved budget.
• Issue detection: Flagging missing documents, mismatched amounts, or ineligible expenses.

The result is a preliminary assessment report that the officer reviews efficiently, rather than reviewing each document individually.

Monitoring and control

AI also adds value in ongoing monitoring:

• Automatic alerts for approaching deadlines.
• Status tracking for each case file.
• Aggregated budget execution reports.
• Early detection of cases at risk of non-compliance.

Regulatory compliance

Grant management is regulated by national grants legislation and its implementing regulations. Any AI tool must ensure:

• Complete traceability of all actions.
• Integrated audit of every decision.
• Consistency with the call's regulatory framework.
• Personal data protection in compliance with GDPR.

A practical example

A public body managing over 500 grant cases per year was spending an average of 4 hours per case solely on justification review. With an AI tool implementation, review time dropped to under 1 hour per case, freeing over 1,500 hours annually that the team could redirect to higher-value tasks.

The key was not just the technology, but its integration with existing workflows: the tool adapted to the organization's process, not the other way around.

Where to begin

The recommendation for any administration is to start with the phase that generates the most workload. In most cases, that phase is grant justification review. A focused pilot enables rapid validation of results and builds team confidence before scaling to other phases of the cycle.