Introducing Award Force’s AI tools: Private, secure and responsible AI for awards management at scale

At Award Force, we’re driven by a commitment to meaningful innovation. Rather than settling for surface-level features, we set out to build an AI solution that truly serves our clients. Something that is readily accessible and adds genuine value, while importantly, maintaining the same private and secure approach our clients have come to depend on.

And we have done just that.

Here are some insights into how we’ve built it, what you can expect and how you can activate it.

Award Force AI tools coming soon

We are proud to introduce Award Force AI tools, a new set of optional, responsible, privacy-first AI capabilities designed to help awards program managers do more, work smarter and more fairly—at scale.

This new toolset marks the start of a future-forward direction for Award Force: a family of intelligent, secure AI features that support the real work awards managers perform. The first AI feature in the toolset is a new AI field for your entry form. And it’s only the beginning.

Why AI tools, not just an AI field

Our AI field type is only the first of our new and upcoming AI tools. There is much more to come. Each new feature will be built with the same guiding principles of safety, fairness and practicality. This is not about adding gimmicks—that’s not the Award Force way, it is about building a responsible AI foundation we can all grow with.

Privacy and security come first

AI tools were designed from the ground up to keep your awards data safe and private. While many alternate vendors rely on third-party processing, Award Force keeps every AI interaction inside our secure Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

We offer a choice of powerful language models that run entirely within Award Force’s infrastructure. Your data stays private, processed only within your region, and never leaves our environment or reaches external model providers or sub-processors.

Every AI response is generated securely, with full compliance and confidentiality. Awards program managers maintain complete control over the information our AI tools can access, who can configure these AI tools and who can view the results.

Your trust is not something we take lightly. Security, privacy and control are built into every layer of this release.

And yes, it is 100% optional. Let’s discuss that quickly.

Your awards, your choice

While Award Force’s AI tools are going to add much value to your program, we understand there are individuals and organisations rightly concerned about the risks of AI. That’s all to say, we won’t force this on you—the choice to use AI is yours and you must opt-in to take advantage of them.

In the absence of an opt-in from your Award Force account—your data will remain isolated and inaccessible to any artificial intelligence models. This isn’t a visually disabled feature running in the background ingesting your data, it is completely separated and must be enabled first.

Now that we have got that important information out of the way, lets go over the new AI field type.

First up: An AI-powered field type for your form

At the heart of this launch is an AI field, a new field type (or question type) for your entry form.

AI fields introduces an intelligent new field type that empowers program managers to ask natural language questions of all entries automatically (or manually for individual entries) and receive instant, context-aware (and context-limited) insights directly within Award Force.

Once you have opted-in, all you need to get going is to simply add an AI field to your entry form, write a prompt, decide when it is allowed to work and you are done! There are far more controls available but it really can be as simple as that.

You can use AI fields to:

• Summarise or analyse entries automatically or manually for specific entries
• Generate fair, consistent feedback for entrants
• Support judging with clear, contextual insights
• And so much more!

Manually probe specific entries of interest or run it against all entries automatically for maximum benefits and insights at scale.

And program managers can decide whether to keep AI responses private or share them with judges and entrants. The setup is simple but, as always, the choice and control is all yours.

What comes next

AI fields is just the first step. Over time, AI tools will expand to include more intelligent features across more views and resources in Award Force to enhance insight, efficiency and fairness across every stage of your awards program.