AskHugh.ai (Helping you get Grants Hassle-free)

Problem Statement

How Might We help business owners swiftly navigate a dense grants landscape to find those best suited to their needs?

Problem Formulation Process

There were initially 3 problem statements when we started working on this problem space:

• Problem Statement 1 (PS1): Business owners are missing opportunities to access financial support offered by grants.
• Problem Statement 2 (PS2): High workload for agency staff to answer ad-hoc business queries on grants.
• Problem Statement 3 (PS3): Agency helpdesk staff are unable to give feedback on FAQs and recurring queries in order to improve the presentation of public-facing grant information.

Identifying root cause of the problem statements

These initial problem statements are related but relatively disparate and target different audiences. To restrict to a manageable scope and land on a more concise problem statement, we sought to understand if there is an underlying problem that is contributing to these 3 problem statements.

Team carried out user interviews with 7 business owners to validate pain points, explore viable use cases, and identify problem areas in researching for grants. Team also validated current as-is customer journey maps and obtained data for the relevant customer touchpoints.

Based on interviews with various businesses: Startup, B2B company, F&B, Bedding & KTV and Service Providers. We also collated feedback & researches done by problem owner, we found the common root cause of the three initial problem statements.

• Lack of awareness leads businesses to either give up on grants (causing PS1) or spend excessive time seeking information, burdening agencies (causing PS2).
• Helpdesk inefficiencies (PS3) arise due to recurring issues in obtaining clear grant information.

Thus, we chose to tackle the root problem: Enabling business owners to self-serve and easily find grant information relevant to their needs.

Key Insights Gathered from the business owners Interviews

Business owners generally do not face many challenges finding licenses but struggle with suitable grants. Thus, we narrowed the problem statement to focus on grants instead of both licences and grants.

General themes/trends

1. Business owners generally do not face many challenges finding licenses but struggle with suitable grants.
2. Reliance on external parties for grant discovery: 3rd-party Service providers way of offering assistance is most effective in informing business owners about grants, leading to a lack of proactive grant-seeking behaviour.
3. Fragmented & Scattered Information: Grant details, eligibility, and application processes are scattered across multiple platforms, making navigation difficult.
4. Growing use of AI tools for grant searches: Business owners turn to ChatGPT for grant discovery, but results may be incomplete.

Pain points:

1. Confusion in Existing Platforms: Overlapping platforms (e.g., LicenceOne vs. GoBusiness) add to the uncertainty of where to find grant-related information.

2. Ineffective Helpdesk chat Support: chat support does not fully address queries.

3. Time & Effort to Understand Grant: Significant effort is required to decipher grant criteria, leading some to abandon applications due to hidden requirements.

4. Difficulty navigating service providers: Business owners struggle to find the right service providers for EDG and MRA grants

Proposed Solution Details

Vision for AskHugh.ai We envision AskHugh.ai end goal to be enable business owners to self-serve in different government websites where they could find info on grants applicable to them in reduced time and effort. This can be achieved through a working chatbot that references a grants knowledge base using RAG.

Ideation

• Features that enable agency officers and helpdesk to update grants info and FAQs for faster feedback loops will allow information to be current and lead business owners to the correct next steps.
• Features that improve RAG knowledge base by incorporating SME helpdesk replies to refine recommendations will result in a more up to date knowledge base which the chatbot could leverage and learn from to serve the business owners.
• Features that ensure users receive the right number of grants without being overwhelmed will provide users with enough next steps and checkpoints for them to process their understanding of the grants without resorting to other channels.
• Features that append or able to redirect users to grants application pages will help users save time accessing the specific grant application page without having to scour the grant website again
• Features that translates current knowledge base into other languages will benefit users who are not well versed in English and yet could allow them to make their grants analysis and decide on application.

Impact and Outcome Analysis

Future Plans

Meet the Team

From left to right: Zulkifli Mohd Yusof, Hong Sum Lok, Joshua Tan (Team Lead), Jia Ling Goh and Cheryl Wong. (Not in photo: Leon Voon)

AskHugh.ai Team members and divisions