How Writer is helping Fortune 500 companies become AI-forward

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You know, one thing that AI never asks is, Why did you ask me that question? AI is always like, Oh, I'm so glad you asked, or you are brilliant, or thank you for asking me that. Let me tell you, blah, blah, blah, right? It's incredibly subservient.

That's May Habib, CEO and co-founder of the AI Studio Writer.

And I think the meaning of being human is to not be, right? At Writer, we've got this saying, break rank, break glass, and that's what I think it means to be human compared to being AI.

May and the team behind Writer take no issue breaking rank in Silicon Valley. They're shaking up the status quo with an army of AI agents that can handle all sorts of enterprise tasks that humans normally do, from writing website blurbs to drafting business proposals. These are often time-consuming menial tasks, and automating them is saving companies millions. Companies like Salesforce and Uber, to name a few on their client roster. Writer, which May founded in 2020, is now valued at $1.9 billion.

On this week of Pioneers of AI, May and I are digging into the nuts and bolts behind one of Silicon Valley's rising disruptors. We'll talk about human-AI collaborations, data privacy, and building a unicorn startup in the age of AI. I'm Rana El Kaliouby, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution. May, welcome to Pioneers of AI. It's so great to have you on the show.

Thank you, Rana. So nice to be here with you.

So we have a lot that we share in common. We're both of Arab descent. You, I believe, were born in Lebanon and then grew up in Canada. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. We went back and forth a lot. Um, so I definitely feel very Lebanese.

Uh-huh. Do you still go back?

I haven't been in a while, um, since before COVID. You know, you always say next year, um, but inshallah now actually next year.

Inshallah, Inshallah, that's great. We're also both young global leaders at the World Economic Forum.

Yeah, it's such a great community.

It is, yeah. Okay. My most burning question for for today, actually, is that you and my daughter Jenna both graduated with a major in Near Eastern languages and civilizations.

Yes, indeed, yes.

But somehow you ended up in tech, so I feel like there's hope for my daughter.

Yeah, I mean, I it's it's, it's gonna be the only industry left. It's so exciting.

After years of working in venture capital, May founded her first company, Cordoba, in 2015. It started out as a software company helping their clients write clear, consistent content across languages.

I was a machine translation company, and we did everything from human translation to machine generated translation, all in a platform that helped enterprises really build highly localized products and doing it in an engineering-friendly way.

Cordoba allowed companies to enter new markets by translating all of their content into new languages with ease. But when transformers hit the scene, a kind of neural network architecture that bred LLMs, May saw new opportunities. Her work didn't need to stop at translation. Generative AI opened the door for all kinds of business automation. In 2020, she co-founded Writer. So you describe Writer as a full-stack AI-powered platform that helps your customers and your, you know, your enterprise customers become AI-first and agentic-first.

Unpack that for us. What does it actually mean?

Yeah, so, you know, in 2023, we said dominant design and generative AI looked like LLMs and retrieval and guardrails and an AI studio, an AI studio because you really needed business and subject matter experts to collaborate. And we called it a dominant design architecture because we said this is the only way to build highly reliable, effective, um, AI systems on top of highly non-deterministic technology. And, you know, two years later, everybody has an AI studio, everybody has an agent builder, but compared to Writer, they're still very thin wrappers on top of the LLMs.

And what we've been able to do year over year is really invest in those AI native primitives that make it really easy to actually connect LLMs to data, to workflow, to guardrails, to produce highly precise use cases, insights, content, um, in highly regulated environments. So, you know, agentically, we are doing client onboarding, we are doing KYC.

Know your customer.

Yes, we are doing orchestrated digital marketing. And, you know, it is it's it's agents that just work in a way that is just not happening on any other platform.

Basically, May is saying that Writer offers a lot of capabilities to their clients, whether that's integrating their AI agents into marketing strategies or using them to help automate fraud detection. She says that her clients are seeing results.

So it's been, you know, super incredible to see our customers really lead their markets. Um, you know, customers like Uber and Salesforce and Accenture and NVIDIA are using Writer internally, uh, to really streamline all sorts of, uh, of operations.

So May, can you walk us through some examples of how your customers are using Writer in their workflows?

Yeah, Uber, we've got an incredible support team there that is using our agentic AI, uh, in their, uh, documentation and support processes. So they use Writer agents to classify Jira and Slack requests, they assess urgency, and they generate updated responses and content, right, based on that. Um, the AI agent is staging the updates in the CMS, and they're publishing it upon approval. And so there's this very artful orchestration between the deterministic and non-deterministic aspects of, um, this this workflow, and it's incredibly amplifying to what the the the human teams are are doing.

Tons of manual handoffs reduced, right, reducing content maintenance and production costs, et cetera. RFPs and business proposals are also incredibly rich for agentic AI. Um, at a company called CommVault, a cybersecurity company, AI agents from Writer were automatically pulling RFP files from Salesforce. We're associating them with the right opportunity. We're setting up a dedicated Microsoft team channel where teams can actually collaborate on the AI generated responses that are based on previous RFPs that the teams have been successful in.

And then once they're verified by people right there in the channel, we are automatically actually producing the final PDF of that proposal or that RFP and then sent to the client.

This is really interesting with my investor hat on. One of the areas that I'm very excited to be investing in is this idea of an AI employee, right? Like an agentic AI, which is basically embedded into a workflow and is able to start with, like, you know, a number of tasks, but increase, increase its ability and its scope of responsibility over time as it learns and evolves. But it's working alongside human teams. And your example of the kind of working on the RFP proposal, I have this picture in my mind.

There's the Microsoft Teams channel with all these humans and the agentic AIs. Is this kind of how it works?

So I I don't like to anthropomorphize AI, um, but the the mental model of managing agents like employees is actually more apt than managing agents like software, right? But you actually do need a agentic PM that can think about how you get these agents to do things reliably. Our head of product Matan likes to say, yes, agents don't follow rules, but you can get them to behave. And really taking the build process from, you know, this very deterministic software-based approach to how you actually align behavior of an agentic system.

Using the mental model of an employee is actually, um, really helpful. Like in Writer, we build blueprints, we don't build workflows, because that's that's very deterministic, and that's not what we're really doing here when we orchestrate these agents against a goal, right? These are really goal-oriented and can take lots of different paths to achieve a goal within guardrails. But, you know, your blueprint for that agentic system is kind of like your job description, right, for an employee.

Um, your prompt setup, your grounding, that's like how you onboard an employee, your escalation paths, your fallback agents, those are like your managers, you know, um, how you do performance reviews, how you do feedback and coaching, that's your outcome tracking, that's your evaluation setup, that's your retraining. And then we've also built just lifecycle management for agentic. So how do you deprecate them if they cost too much relative to the value, or folks aren't using them anymore, or they've been replaced by something else?

That's the equivalent of, like, firing?

Yeah, yeah, exactly, termination, right? And so the mental model of them as employees, I think we can, you know, think of them as a super employee, right? An employee that really needs to be a member of multiple teams to be able to get their objective achieved.

Yeah. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, how Writer is increasing enterprise visibility in a post-SEO world and the new job opportunities that agentic AI is creating. Stay with us. The companies winning right now aren't just building great AI. They're building the infrastructure to actually run a business on top of it, which is where Stripe comes in. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, with planetary scale financial infrastructure to help you power any business model.

As a matter of fact, 86% of the Forbes AI fifty run on Stripe, along with industry leaders like Salesforce and Pepsi. Last year, Stripe users processed $1.9 1 trillion combined. See how Stripe can power what's next for your business at stripe dot com. When you onboard a customer, what does this look like?

Yeah, so we are actually a verticalized platform. And so when we onboard a CPG customer, it looks a little bit different than we onboard somebody in retail, onboard a technology customer. We have libraries of hundreds of pre-built agents, and then they're quite powerful. So, you know, um, a Qualcomm that does really sophisticated, uh, ABM, that's account-based marketing, or a, um, Salesforce that does, uh, incredibly powerful comms and PR, right? Their use cases are going to be different.

And what we're able to do is onboard them into libraries of, you know, pre-built agents that are ready for configuration for their systems, right? Their their tooling. If you are doing GEA, that's generative AI engine optimization,

What does that mean, actually, by the way?

it's a new term, yeah, AEO, GEO is the new SEO. You know, when when you really think about how much of the consumer market is turning to LLMs for search, right? Really thinking about your web footprint as a brand and what it's going to mean for the visibility of your products, your SKUs, your viewpoints. You absolutely can structure agentically, restructure all of um your site map to be much more amenable to the kind of web search patterns, um, and the the training data collection, right, of of LLMs.

I'll give you like the tiniest kind of tactical thing that we do. So much of conventional search is keywords based, but LLMs really like nice, comprehensive paragraphs and sentences, right, in their responses. And so actually being able to mirror your content automatically, right? It's it's exciting to get to take solutions to customers where generative AI is a solution to a problem that generative AI caused. Um, right, but you know, it's it it really gets to the change management complexity.

Right? Yeah, so I kind of wanna like simplify this transition from search engine optimization, which is essentially search based on keywords, which is we've had for the last, I don't know, like twenty, twenty five years, to this transition to generative AI engine optimization. And I love that term, which is essentially modifying or adapting your content so that it could be found by a gen AI search engine, like a perplexity or whatever's out there. That's super cool.

And I think that's going to also create new business models and monetization, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I I think the consumer LLMs are are likely to do, you know, the kinds of things that Snapchat did, right, like brand takeovers, um, exclusivity in certain categories. So there's definitely going to be an explosion of that. And then I think the brands that really get there first will have first-mover advantage.

So a lot of the work you do, I imagine with with your customers, isn't just about the technology, to your point, it's about change management and bringing kind of the organization and the employees on board with all of these new tools and technologies. I imagine a lot of our listeners are grappling with how to do that, how to become AI first, how to incorporate AI into their workflows. What have you seen that works? Um, like, what are some of the best practices that your customers are using?

Yeah, so too many customers are saying, help us become an AI-first company. In fact, there's a mandate to be an AI-first company, and they don't back it up with the proper resourcing, right? And we've got an incredible delivery team that works really closely, you know, no daylight between us with our customers in helping them, you know, hands-on keyboard, really build out solutions that can can go live in in a matter of days, matter of weeks. But the real scale of the program is going to depend on do you have agentic product managers that can rewire workflows that have been built up over decades?

Do you have AI builders who, you know, we can now address a whole range of software capabilities, right? It's like vibe coding on steroids at Writer, right? I mean, you're literally this is you're writing a prompt of a process, and we are unfurling the agentified version of that, right? That you just really need to modify. The code is there already, right, that you're able to go out and and modify. And so, you know, when you think about what that means is, you know, we we have made building tooling and software a thousand times easier in the enterprise.

It can go straight to, like, build it and scale it because the guardrails are are really powerful. And but back to your question, this is a lot for organizations to think about. And, you know, we are we are seeing best practices be, yes, I've invested in, you know, full-time folks focused on generative AI. And I think about it as two in a box down every team, engineering and the business, right, together. Because you as a technology team aren't going to be able to build agents for the enterprise in an isolated way.

You need them there for a highly iterative collaboration. And that's just a different set of skills that, you know, we we really help mirror for our customers, um, in the people that they have put up to say, yes, this is our agent PM, this is our agent builder. These are the people who are going to build on writer.

So agent product manager and agent builder, these are new types of jobs. Can you talk about what these look like?

Yeah, absolutely. Your product manager, right? Your junior product manager is gonna be somebody who can absolutely transition to be an agent PM. But they've got to start thinking about the agent development life cycle, right, versus software development life cycle. And remember what we said at the beginning, like, agents are systems that are goal-oriented that can create their own steps and workflows that can rebuild, right, those steps as they try to achieve a a goal. And so the requirements gathering is no longer, oh, legal needs a chat bot.

It's all right, I'm gonna build an agentic system that cuts down my contract review time, right? And that kind of outcome orientation, um, and the pr the specificity of the problem that we're solving much more than here's what the UI should look like or here is what the steps should be to solve this problem. You know, that's a that's a change in in mindset. And so, yes, it's a process design that's an input for things that are existing processes inside of a company.

You know how you pay an invoice or how you onboard a vendor in your supply chain or how you onboard a customer, um, into your mortgage product. But it is the behavior design of the agent, um, that you are building to address those problems that we really want the PM to own. What What differentiates Writer and what's your competitive moat?

very cool?

Yeah, this is a space that moves so fast. Speed and iteration is the only moat. And, you know, I think you can boil that down even further. Culture is a moat in this space. And I think, you know, when we look at our business, we're very proud that our top thirty-ish customers are at 217% NRR. You know, this is customers that are tripling spend with us, um, you know, Global 2,000 customers in the, like, trailing twelve period.

And it's only it's only going up. And a huge part of that is the multi-year investment in the architecture blocks, um, in a highly disciplined way, maniacally focused on the enterprise. And it starts with our AI research team. You know, we got to synthetic data before anybody else. We got to graph-based retrieval before anybody else. We got to self-evolving models before anybody else. Because we've got this really exceptionally fast feedback loop between the customer and our research team.

You know, the the partners, um, that we work with have agentic AI too. And I think there will be a lot of winners. Um, you know, your traditional software companies are going to spend a lot of time building agentic interfaces into their own data and into their own products. And it's a really big market for the workflows that don't exist because it's too hard to create these interactions between data silos, right? And the unstructured data that sits in people's heads that really define how to do something.

And so we we play that role in a really unique way.

Unlike the slew of other agentic AI companies, Writer is not using off-the-shelf LLMs. They've built their own models, and we'll get to why they made this decision after a short break. So we love on this show to take our listeners behind the scenes and kind of unpack what is the what, what's behind the products you're building. You mentioned a few kind of key features of your products that that give you a competitive moat, so let's talk about those.

So, first of all, let's talk about your LLMs. I think it's really interesting that you decided to build your own as opposed to, you know, build on top of other foundation models. How did you make that decision and why?

Yeah, we were born as a native transformer company. The story of Writer is the story of the Transformer, and our Palmyra X four and X five are are the workhorses of agentic workloads. So, token context windows and the millions of tokens, um, breakthrough speed, the ability to process thousands of pages in twenty seconds, the ability to tool call in a microsecond, adaptive hybrid reasoning. And, you know, when you think about the way that you daisy chain so many AI components together when you do agentic AI, incredibly important to have models that are fit for purpose.

These are not small models. They're, you know, 500 billion plus parameter uh models, but we have architected the transformers to be highly efficient. So the total cost of ownership is incredibly attractive to customers when they really understand that retrieval in and agents and the the platform are really all in one. And the reliability, the consistency. The last point, um, is really around transparency. We give our customers more transparency into how we build our models, how we train our models than they get from open source.

And that makes a huge difference in folks' abilities to get through model risk. We've got a lot of customers, uh, in financial services and their ability to really have models that they trust under the hood. You know, we get to help them with data that, you know, they consider highly confidential and really access it in a way that they understand is is very safe. We don't use their data for training, or the models are actually trained on completely synthetic data.

But we give them, you know, the visibility they need into training data, weights, architecture, um, the guardrails that we use, the audits to limit bias and toxicity. You get to audit the model's thought process. There's explainability built in.

That is very unusual, by the way. That's very that's very differentiating because most products out there, you're using the LLM as a black box and you have no idea what's going into it and also what it's learning, right?

Yep, 100%. Now we are a agentic orchestrator, so you could use, you know, an agent to call out to any other model. We're multi-model in that regard. Um, and folks use Gemini for image generation. Firefly is a big partner of ours, but, uh, 95% of the workloads are on the Palmyra models.

So the Palmyra X five you announced is able to get to state-of-the-art performance, basically three times faster than the other models and four times cheaper. And one of the key components or secret sauces, I guess, to this is your use of synthetic data. Back in my Affectiva days, we would use synthetic data generators. For example, if we're training, I don't know, we're training a model to detect driver drowsiness, right? The traditional way is to look for examples and in fact, like, go out and collect data of people falling asleep at the wheel, which is kind of really expensive because you want diverse human beings and diverse situations and whatnot.

So instead, we had a synthetic data generator that generated synthetic humans, and we could kind of change the parameters, change the way they're looking, change the degree of drowsiness. So walk us through how are you generating the synthetic data? What's the input to the synthetic data generation models?

Yeah, well, it's it's secret sauce, secret sauce. I won't tell you too much, right? From a data pipeline perspective, you know, what I can share is think about our use of synthetic data as the creation of training data that is precision created, right, for specifically the training of models. And so the way that we structure the data, that's the input to a model that we fine-tune to actually synthesize data that is fit for purpose for training the models that we want to have certain types of behaviors.

And so, you know, we align our models based on what we want them to do, and the synthetic data really flows from that.

Actually, this is a good segue to, um, what I find really interesting about how you are training your LLMs is that you're not actually using your clients' data and you have a zero data retention approach. Tell us more about that. Cause in the world of, you know, machine learning, data's everything, and everybody's like trying to capture every little bit of data, but you have a very responsible approach.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I I think, you know, it's become table stakes to not train models on folks's data, right? OpenAI's not doing that either anymore after a certain level of spend. Um, but we don't have to retain the data. There's absolutely feedback that, uh, users are able to give us manually from within the the product and certain telemetry signals that we are able to infer from. But we can be really generous in, um, how we do the the the data retention.

And it's actually so modifiable that you can just change it in our UI, like in the in the IT command center.

Very cool. Okay, so let's talk about AI replacing jobs and helping companies scale with fewer employees. You have a different perspective that you shared at Davos. You believe that companies that rush towards an AI-led future without bringing their employees on board will be at a disadvantage. Say more.

Yeah, I think it's like getting turkeys to vote for Thanksgiving, you know? I mean, it makes no sense for me to learn this technology, um, bring it to my company if I know I'm doing it to get axed, right? Like, am I really gonna download my brain into this agent so that you don't need me anymore, right? And the reality is, yes, to do this X body of work now, if I were building it AI first, I only need a fraction of the people that are here.

But it doesn't mean that's how I'm going to actually operate or run my business, right? We're gonna launch new products. We are going to enter new markets. Uh, we are going to go after new segments. And that is a much more empowering and exciting message from executives that helps them win, right? And yes, will there be, you know, less need to backfill attrited employees or, you know, headcount avoidance that comes from becoming AI, for sure. But, you know, I I don't see anybody, nor do we advise it, um, folks to go about and, you know, axe axe some people, cause AI is coming.

The most successful customers, right, that that we have seen are going to groups of 300, 400, 500 in healthcare, nurses, doctors, clinicians, and and saying, look, we're gonna take on another customer. All right, we're gonna, we're gonna empower everybody with AI, and we're gonna double our business. And that's actually happening, and that's a success story.

Yeah, I love that. You also shared that AI systems will only be as strong as the diverse perspectives that go into developing and deploying these AI technologies. This is something I'm very passionate about, as you'd imagine. Why why do you think so? Why do you think we need these diverse perspectives?

Yeah, um, you know, this is technology that is going to make a lot of companies much more powerful and a lot of people much more powerful. And, you know, we've got the potential to build a much more, uh, equitable society as a result of the technology at the same time, right? Everybody's got a teacher in their pocket, a doctor in their pocket, right? I'm literally using AI all day on the weekend cause I'm learning new stuff.

And, um, I'm a healthcare freak. And so, you know, I know way too much about HRV, you know, thanks to AI. And that's that doesn't cost any money now, right? And I think really being able to build that technology in a way where everybody feels represented, right? If I'm asking a health question and, you know, the answers are clearly from a point of view, um, that doesn't represent me, then, you know, I'm not going to feel as comfortable in that product.

And I think the the the especially in consumer-facing tech, folks who really think about audiences and and things about building LLMs accordingly, you know, are just going to be more successful.

Yeah, absolutely. And I would be remiss to not mention that you are one of the very few women who are a CEO of an AI company that's a unicorn. So I I just love that and congratulations.

Thanks, Adanna. There are a lot of amazing women at Writer. Um, we're more than 40% women, um, and pretty even across all teams. So if you're listening and you are of any and all genders, um, please message me. We are hiring like crazy across absolutely every function. Uh, we're hiring a lot of industry domain experts as well. So if you, uh, come from a world where you've got specialized expertise and wanna bring it to, uh, enterprises trying to transform their own businesses, AI first, please get in touch with us.

I love that. I love that. What keeps you up at night?

I mean, I I track my sleep pretty religiously, so not that much. Um,

What do you are you an Oura ring or a whoop? I'm a whoop wearer.

I I'm an Oura.

Yeah, I feel like Bay Area's aura.

Yeah, it's one over the West Coast. Yeah, but, uh, you know, th-this is a, uh, an incredibly fast-paced space. I I got to my desk at four a.m. this morning cause I was so excited for my day.

God, okay.

So, you know, there there's a lot of, uh, really hard work and people.

Your aura must be unhappy.

Well, I I fell asleep at eight, so, you know,

Okay, fine, fine.

Aura was happy. I mean, I I shoot for a score over eighty, so

I love that. That's an amazing way to end our interview. Thank you for joining us today. thank you, Dana. Talking to May feels like a glimpse into the future of work. A future where AI agents will be embedded in all types of businesses, doing all kinds of tasks. One, where executives use the superpower as a mechanism to expand their markets while building their human talent pool. But what I find so striking about companies like Writer is the organizational shift they offer.

Imagine a company org chart that lists AI agents like the ones Writer offers, working alongside humans. While I agree with May that we shouldn't anthropomorphize AI, I do think we're approaching a new working order. As an investor in this space, I personally am really excited about these kinds of restructures and its implications on the future of work. I mean, I do think some jobs will disappear, but I also agree with May that AI will create new job opportunities for humans.

Has your workplace integrated agentic AI workflows? How's it been going? Let us know on our hotline. Leave us a voicemail at six zero one six three three two four two four. That's six zero one six three three two four two four. And we might just feature your voice on the show. Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Rachel Ishikawa, and our associate producer is Jordan Smart. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern.

Mixing and mastering by Brian Pew. Original music by Brian Holliday. And our head of podcasts is Lital Molad. You can join the conversation on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X. Just search for at Pioneers of AI. Thanks so much for listening.