MarTech360 Interview With May Habib, Co-founder and CEO, Writer

“ChatGPT and generative AI are seemingly everywhere. There’s a lot of hype, and many unknowns about the future of the technology that folks are using to build on that hype.”

Hi May- If you could walk us through your role at writer.com and provide a bit of background on the company 

I am the co-founder and CEO of Writer, the generative AI platform for enterprises. We empower talent across every area of business — marketing, support, product, HR, and more — to maximize creativity and productivity. Our secure platform snaps easily into business data sources and delivers accurate content that’s fine-tuned on a company’s brand, messaging, and facts. We’re deployed at over 100 enterprise companies across various sectors including UnitedHealthcare, Accenture, Intuit, UiPath, HubSpot, Spotify, Hilton, and Uber. 

You have a degree in Economics. I am curious to know about your professional journey from an Economics background to now working in the field of Generative AI. 

The common thread throughout my professional journey is my love for language. I earned my BA in Economics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where I was Associate Managing Editor of The Harvard Crimson. In March of 2015, I co-founded Qordoba, a multilingual content management technology company, where I worked until September 2020. Later that year, I co-founded and became CEO of Writer. Before founding Qordoba and Writer, I worked from 2007 to 2009 as an analyst at Lehman Brothers, as vice president from 2009 to 2013 at Mubadala Development company, and have been a member of the World Economic Forum since 2011. 

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview With Sean Cunningham, President and CEO, VAB

How were the early days in building up writer.com, and what challenges you and the team faced while creating and marketing the platform? 

One of the biggest challenges was that there wasn’t an easy concept to glom onto in terms of what Writer does. The die-hard brand-focused companies got it, but it wasn’t a must-have for everyone. Now, generative AI has caught everyone’s attention. This has made it so much easier to explain our technology, impact, and competitive positioning. 

Chat GPT has created much buzz in the past few months. How has the world around Generative AI changed over the last few years? and how your platform helps leverage Generative AI.

ChatGPT and generative AI are seemingly everywhere. There’s a lot of hype, and many unknowns about the future of the technology that folks are using to build on that hype. What we do know is that generative AI is here to stay. Our goal at Writer is to move past fringe cases and arrive at impactful business use cases — like automating the creation of hundreds of channel-ready product descriptions for the Victoria’s Secret Adore Me brand or saving security company SentinelOne hundreds of hours a month to repurpose video content into documentation and training materials or indeed enabling Intuit to unify brand voice and write inclusively across all their content. We built this company to solve meaningful business problems for leading companies, delivering both cost savings and scalability to meet top-line goals. 

How is writer.com different from ChatGPT? 

Writer is enterprise-grade and doesn’t use or share your data. It all starts with our proprietary model, where customers own their inputs, training data, and outputs. 

No enterprise leader wants their data to be fodder for someone else’s foundation model, including ours. We give customers all the benefits of the AI application layer without any of the risks of other AI applications and commercial models like ChatGPT. 

A second major difference is that Writer empowers organizations to enforce consistency across all content. When lots of people are using generative AI across marketing, product, support, HR, and other functions, your brand can get Frankenstein-ish in a hurry. We help companies ensure consistency of messaging, brand voice, key terminology, and company facts across all their people and use cases. 

How can writer.com help transform B2B marketing? Why should marketers leverage your platform? 

Writer helps businesses use generative AI for content generation, research, analysis, and repurposing into their day-to-day workflows and apps. Organizations that experience brand inconsistencies and content bottlenecks struggle to achieve their growth targets. When done right, we’ve seen that content powers growth programs at scale — with your best writers and editors empowered as content program scalers, and your employees empowered to write on-brand.

Generative AI tech space is being clouded as there are tons of platforms available, what makes writer.com stand apart from the competition. 

We purposefully built Writer for the needs of businesses. From our foundation model all the way up to the way we apply a company’s style guide, we focused on solving business use cases to help companies with consistent, on-brand content. Through the foundational training set focused on B2B and then additional, customer-specific fine-tuning and training, Writer customers will get accurate, impactful, and on-brand output that they can’t get through other AI applications. 

Generative AI replaces human efforts- will that mean there will be fewer jobs on content creation or branding? Any thoughts? 

Generative AI is the thing of the moment. People are experimenting with generation types and pairing those with different use cases. I’m thrilled that businesses are finding ways for generative AI to improve workflows and impact their bottom-line. The transition from “this is cool” to “this just helped me do my job better” is happening right now, and it’s exciting to see. 

Share more on the Model Fitting process – Does your product use users’ inputs to train your model further? Do you follow stringent security standards? 

Training the Writer models happens securely on a company’s own provided data and their style and brand guidelines. The result is content that’s consistent and on-brand, whether the initial text came from humans or from AI. Yes, we prioritize security and privacy, and it shows in the customers that have chosen us and in our compliance with SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, and Privacy Shield . We don’t store or use fine-tuning data, or the output we generate.

Where do you see the future of content marketing heading? 

I think we’re going to be dropping the “generative.” AI is going to be about more than fun images and email writing – it will transform all of our knowledge processes at work.

Thanks May!