Researchers lose a lot of their working time to administrative tasks. Grant preparation is the biggest offender, and it compounds: you find opportunities in one place, reformat proposals for another, and repeat the cycle across agencies with different requirements. Adam Kiefer (UNC-Chapel Hill Exercise and Sport Science) helped design GROW (Grant Research Opportunity Wizard) to solve this problem.

GROW is an open-source agentic AI tool developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services. The tool uses AI agents (powered by Amazon Bedrock) to crawl global funding databases, match opportunities against a researcher’s expertise profile, and generate proposal templates already formatted to funder specifications. In this talk, John Paul Laverde (AWS) and Adam Kiefer will walk through how GROW evolved from a generative AI drafting assistant into a fully agentic discovery and matching system, demo it live, and discuss what it means for institutions trying to scale grant competitiveness without scaling headcount.

Key Takeaways

• Agentic AI can reclaim significant time researchers currently lose to manual grant searching and proposal reformatting.
• GROW autonomously discovers and matches global funding opportunities to a researcher’s expertise, surfacing grants they would never find on their own.
• The tool is open-source and deployable by any research organization (universities, government labs, nonprofits), not just well-resourced institutions.
• Agentic AI is meaningfully different from generative AI: GROW doesn’t just respond to prompts, it acts autonomously on the researcher’s behalf.
• Collaboration between academic researchers and industry partners like AWS can produce tools that solve systemic inefficiencies across the research enterprise.

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