(US & Canada) VIDEO | We Open Up Hundreds of Generative AI Use Cases — Writer Co-Founder and CEO

May Habib, Co-Founder and CEO of generative AI platform Writer, speaks with Kirk Ball, EVP and Chief Information Officer, Giant Eagle Inc., in a video interview about her professional journey, the inception of Writer, its usages, and how clients can reinvent workflows through Writer.

Beginning the conversation, Habib states that she has been an entrepreneur in natural language processing (NLP) for over a decade. Her first venture was in machine translation, through which she was able to discover and invent much of the technology that went on to become widespread. Before that, she worked in the investing and banking sectors within technology and prior to that, studied economics and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Harvard University.

Moving forward, Habib shares an observation that entering a new market involves taking a slice of the company and translating it into a new language. Through this, Habib and her team gain significant insight into the content workflows that exist in larger enterprises. They discover recurring issues such as a lack of quality, consistency, off-brand material, and compliance and regulatory restrictions that slow down the process.

Further, Habib shares that in 2019, her team decided to use the same technology utilized in translation to convert bad material to good and off-brand material to on-brand. This idea led to the creation of Writer.

Since the onset, the vision has been to eventually automate the writing process so that Writer can be trusted to pencil in first drafts for people. This vision was established three years ago, Habib reveals.

In continuation, she suggests that people considering integrating generative AI into enterprise workflows have the option of either getting a secure solution from Azure or OpenAI on their cloud and then building everything else on top of it, or finding a spot solution to solve one problem or scale up a single process.

She maintains that her company offers full-stack generative AI, so people can use the highly competitive models.

Thereafter, Habib shares Writer has just been benchmarked by the Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) above ChatGPT. She affirms that the company offers indemnification to enterprise customers, such as those in the healthcare and finance sectors, and customers can host it in a private cloud.

Habib further explains that her company does not use customer data to train models and customers have full copyright to anything that comes from the model.

In addition, she explains that building applications using Writer opens up hundreds of use cases like finance using generative AI for supply chain analysis, marketing creating content, or investor relations creating call scripts for earnings calls.

Habib states that the platform offers a composable UI that allows users to build their applications, while Writer AI provides secure models and manages MLOps and fine-tuning for the use case.

Then, Habib remarks that organizations currently display elements of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," with some being too cautious and others taking a too aggressive approach. The optimal approach lies somewhere in a middle ground, which involves jumping into the unknown and learning from it as you go - even if it feels risky, she says.

In conclusion, Habib notes that her team has been leaning into clients who have developed responsible AI policies, and codes of conduct, and have co-developed material with customers to provide a headstart on policy and governance work. These clients have currently moved out of the sandbox and are building applications, putting them in production, and reinventing workflows with AI responsibly and strategically, she says.

CDO Magazine appreciates May Habib for sharing insights with our global community.