The four questions research offices kept asking us at NCURA 2026
We had a booth at the NCURA Annual Conference 2026, with a small putting green on it. The putting was the fun part. What we did not expect was how many people wanted to have a conversation about their grants process in detail.
For the team, that was a win. We got to have raw conversations with the people who run research administration every day, and they tell you what they are dealing with. A lot fo questions were asked but only four of them were in nearly 8/10 conversations.
AI Adoption v Efficiency
Almost nobody asked what AI is, because that question is no longer interesting. What people asked instead was narrower and more useful.
Where does AI take repetitive work out of grants management without adding risk? The worry underneath it was efficiency. If your office adopts an AI-led step, does the work actually get shorter, or have you just added a second thing to check?
“Which tasks become faster, and what happens when the AI is wrong”
Integration, every single time
Nobody wants another standalone system. People said that to us more or less word for word, over and over. If only we had a dollar every time we heard these phrases.
The questions were consistent:
- how a grants system connects to whichever finance system you already run
- whether HR data flows across, so staff costs on each award stay accurate
- whether you end up with one set of grant records instead of several
More people raised that last point than we expected. Several described holding the same award in two or three places and reconciling them manually before a report goes out to the sponsor.
Less money, more competition
Recent US government changes mean lower sponsorship levels and more competition for what is left. This was the least comfortable subject of the conference and probably the most honest one.
Much of the discussion was about how institutions stay competitive when success rates fall, and how the community supports each other while that happens. Nobody was pretending. Research offices are being asked to win more awards with less money, and they know it.
What sponsors ask for is getting stricter
Federal agencies and foundations are both tightening what they expect from institutions. People named three areas:
- governance of how each award is managed once it is live
- due diligence requirements before and during the award
- eligibility rules that decide whether a proposal is worth preparing at all
The third one changes your workload the most. If you can tell in the first hour that you do not meet an eligibility rule, you have saved the entire cost of preparing that proposal. Multiply that across a year and you would end up saving time and money
What we have been building
The last six months of GrantsNow development went into the same areas. AI-led checks against sponsor eligibility rules now run before anyone starts writing, so you find out early when a proposal is not worth preparing. Governance and due diligence are built into award set-up rather than added afterwards. And you can cost a proposal quickly, before you commit to submitting it.
GrantsNow keeps the whole grants process in one place, from finding and applying for sponsorship through tracking spend, staying compliant, and reporting back to sponsors. Teams stop reentering data between disconnected systems, administrative costs drop by up to 25%, and more time goes back to the programmes the sponsorship is paying for.
We are all ears
The useful part of the week was hearing that research offices are already thinking about the same areas we have been building in. If you were at NCURA and we spoke, tell us which of the four mattered most in your office.
Incase we did not get the chance to talk, contact us and we will set up a short walkthrough at a time that suits you. No sales talk, we promise!
