Working AI: May Habib's Writer sells a new way of doing things

Such savings have spiked Writer’s net retention rate to a stunning 160 percent, indicating that customers end up expanding their contracts by 60 percent on average. Habib says 20 customers started with contracts between $200,000 and $300,000, quickly found new ways to use Writer’s tools and are now spending about $1 million each. A pitch deck from last fall shows it brought in $9.3 million in revenue in 2023 and was forecasting $28 million in revenue for 2024. Writer said the figures were inaccurate and declined to comment, but shared it currently has over $50 million in signed contracts, expected to double to $100 million this year. 

Writer’s confidence stems from its newest product, “AI HQ”, which includes tools to build artificially intelligent agents that can perform a series of tasks that are typically part of the workflow of an actual job. A financial analyst, for instance, could create an agent that pulls data from earnings-call transcripts, analyses it and emails a personalised version to their entire client list. No coding is required; you just explain in plain English the sequence of steps you want the agent to carry out and click a button. At an annual cost that can reach into the millions, Writer also provides more than 70 pregenera­ted apps and agents that clients can use immediately. “People don’t have to do the work,” Habib says. “They only have to build AI that does it for them.” 

Already, major customers like fintech Intuit ($16.3 billion in 2024 revenue) and homebuil­der Lennar (sales: $35.4 billion) are trying out Writer’s agent tools. Lennar CTO Scott Spradley says his team’s Writer agents have so far written thousands of email responses to inquiries from potential buyers, scheduling appointments to view the company’s thousands of homes and providing information like their price or location. “It’s driving volume, it’s driving activity, it’s creating better leads,” he says.

Also read: How expensive is it to have your own AI agent, really?

It also heralds the beginning of a paradigm shift for businesses looking to shave labour costs. Why bother paying people to do what an AI agent can do equally well and faster? That’s the real opportunity for Writer and the rest of the $58 billion enterprise AI market. Habib is blunt about what this means for rank-and-file knowledge workers: “Ten percent of the headcount is going to be enough.” 

With the enterprise AI software market poised nearly to double to $114 billion by 2027, competition is stiff. Deep-pocketed OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised a collective $42 billion, sell barebones models that businesses can then use to build tools. But they typi­cally require a team of developers to calibrate, deploy and update. Writer’s tech is largely plug-and-play, with user-friendly drag-and-drop interfaces. It doesn’t require messing around with AI models or crafting the perfect prompt every time. “We make so much of the magic invisible for folks,” Habib says. 

It has done that by home-brewing the models that power AI Studio and AI HQ. That’s important for security: Client data is retrieved from dedicated servers and isn’t used to train models, mitigating concerns about sensitive information leaking. Writer’s models address another core concern businesses have with AI: Its occasional tendency to make things up. Writer’s AIs pull data directly from customers’ documents, guaranteeing far fewer hallucinations, if less creativity. But who needs poetry when your AI is genera­ting market analysis? 

In a world in which OpenAI spent $100 million to train GPT-4, Writer is doing all this relatively cheaply. Its rival model cost just $700,000 to build. That’s far less even than DeepSeek, the Chinese company that upended the AI world by building a model that competes with OpenAI’s at a fraction of the cost. “DeepSeek made efficiency cool, but Writer has been doing it for years,” says Rob Toews, a Writer board member and partner at Toronto-based VC shop Radical Ventures, which is an investor. 

Not everyone is sold. Some experts are unsure whether Wri­ter’s smaller models can keep up with the giants. On popular leaderboards, which rank models based on how well they answer a host of questions, Writer trails AI juggernauts like OpenAI and Anthropic, whose revenue is in the billions. OpenAI has 1 million paying users for ChatGPT Enterprise, and Anthropic reportedly projects it will grow to $34.5 billion in revenue by 2027, two-thirds of which will come from enterprise users. “Writer’s great strength has been evangelising what they’re doing. I think the challenge is making sure the technology can live up to that,” says a venture capitalist.

Writer trained its own models (named Palmyra, for the ancient Syrian city) even though they were advised not to. “You don’t need to play by the rules all the time,” says CTO Waseem Alshikh

Habib is confident it can. Companies care more about real-world performance than benchmark horse races. And with a client roster that already includes blue-chip outfits like Accenture, Hilton, Spotify and Qualcomm, Writer’s investors are happy to continue betting on her. “She just can run through walls and make the impossible happen,” Toews says. Even VCs who passed on the last round speak admiringly of her. “She’s just kind of a force of nature,” says one. 

Entrepreneurship runs in the family, says Habib, who grew up in a tiny village on the war-torn border of Lebanon and Syria. Her father started his own tool-and-dye shop, while her mother worked at a pita bakery. The eldest of eight siblings, Habib was managing the family chequebook by 9. Her family fled the civil war to Canada in 1990, and Habib, the only one in her family who spoke English, graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a degree in economics and a minor in Eastern languages. While working as an investment banker in Dubai, she met Alshikh, 40, a Syrian technol­ogy executive who had taught himself to speak English so he could learn to code.

 Alshikh’s first company, which converted satellite photos into digital maps for cars, was taken over by the Syrian government because it thought he wasn’t “patriotic” enough, he says; in retaliation, he claims he hacked into the government’s servers to shut down the internet in the country. 

The duo launched the first iteration of Writer in 2015 as machine translation company Qordoba, before pivo­ting to build AI that could generate content in a company’s style and tone, relaunching as Writer in 2020. Twitter became one of its first customers. (After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he stopped paying; Writer sued and eventually got 95 percent of what it was owed. X, as Twitter is now known, did not respond to a request for comment.) 

Habib jokes that Writer has evolved into a different company every four to six months to stay relevant. “We are the Eras Tour of generative AI,” she says, nodding to Taylor Swift’s career-timeline concerts. “We extract the rate of change for companies that can’t get their heads around it on their own.” 

It’s fitting, then, the next stage involves a new approach to AI. Alshikh calls it “self-evolving”. His team is building models that learn from mistakes automatically, without needing a human to correct them. “It’s like hiring smart people in your companies,” he says. “You expect them over time to know more and learn more.” 

For Habib, this means new possibilities, and she can’t wait to get in the room with her customers to sketch them out together. “Even now, the team knows there has to be a whiteboard,” she says. “I can’t co-think or co-create with a customer without trying to imagine something that doesn’t exist.” 

Additional reporting by Richard Nieva