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Give AI the estimator's spreadsheet, your proposal template and past proposals, then check the client-ready proposal it returns

who Lee Mokri, owner of Geared for Growing, a 40-year-old landscape design, construction and maintenance company in Sonoma County, California, in his Green Industry Pros column

The problem

The estimator builds cost breakdowns in a spreadsheet with unit costs, labor hours and material lines that you wouldn't put in front of a client, and turning that into a proposal a homeowner could understand used to take a full morning of copying, pasting, formatting and proofreading.

What happened

He says AI is very good at that translation work and that a finished estimate now spends less time sitting in his drafts folder, but it also misses things: one maintenance proposal it helped assemble showed $30,000 in the pricing table and promised further down that the work would not exceed $28,000. Every number, date and promise still gets checked against the company's own records before it goes out, and "AI hasn't become our estimator." No hour figures. Self-reported.

Quoted in the source: Lee Mokri, owner, Geared for Growing. Source: Green Industry Pros: I Ran A Landscape Company With AI For A Year: Here's What Actually Worked (Lee Mokri) (2026-10-15) · Added 2026-10-19.

How to set it up yourself

1. What Geared for Growing does: the estimator still builds the numbers; AI only turns the finished spreadsheet into a clear, formatted proposal and flags inconsistencies.
2. Give the AI three things together: the finished estimate spreadsheet, your proposal template and two or three proposals you've actually sent.
3. Use the prompt below, then check every price, quantity, date and promise against the spreadsheet yourself, including any total that appears in more than one place.
4. Never hand it an incomplete estimate: he warns it fills the gap with a confident, invented answer instead of asking for the missing information.

Copy-paste prompt

Attached: our finished estimate for {PROJECT} for {CLIENT} (spreadsheet), our proposal template, and {NUMBER} proposals we've sent before. Turn the estimate into a client-facing proposal in our template and style: explain the scope in plain English, group line items the way our past proposals do, and keep every price, quantity and date exactly as in the spreadsheet. Before the proposal, list any inconsistencies you find (quantities or totals that don't match, items missing from the scope) and anything you need to ask me. Don't fill gaps with guesses.

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