May Habib on Building Writer into a $2B+ Enterprise AI Platform

May Habib on why Writer bets on governed enterprise AI

Writer is betting that enterprise AI will be won by a full-stack, pure-play vendor that pairs its own foundation models with agents built for regulated workflows. The company sells to the front office, where governance and consistency matter more than novelty, and it argues that the next models will learn an organization's routines and prompt users. Habib's path from Lebanon to Lehman and Mubadala shaped that conviction, and she later rebuilt Qordoba as Writer.

Takeaways

• Writer bets on full-stack enterprise AI. Writer has raised $369m and is valued at $1.9bn. It builds its own Palmyra foundation models, which carry more than 90% of its volume, and sells agents for front-office workflows. Technology customers include Microsoft, Salesforce, Nvidia, HubSpot and Qualcomm.
• Regulated industries demand reliability and consistency. After a Wild West start, Writer picked healthcare and financial services because those customers care most about reliability and consistency at scale. The technology forces compliance and brand teams into one conversation, since the silos do not exist inside Writer.
• Trust comes from focus and governance. Habib says Writer earns trust by doing only this and by pushing customers to question their assumptions. Alexa von Tobel describes the company's reputation as responsible autonomy, with agents that act independently but stay aligned to a company's values and compliance.
• LLMs will prompt users, not wait. Habib expects self-evolving models that learn an organization's routines and absorb the ambient intelligence agents create. She says the LLM becomes the new system of record, and companies could see two- to threefold sales productivity from their best salespeople.
• Value shifts to orchestrating execution. As execution becomes abundant and on demand, Habib argues people will be rewarded for orchestrating systems rather than doing one task at a time. She predicts career lattices replace narrow ladders, with more joyful and creative work over time.
• Work changes gradually, then radically. Habib says work in five to ten years will still be recognizable, but in thirty years it will not, because human-computer interfaces become the norm and humanoids enter workplaces. Those two innovations have not yet hit even early mainstream.

Writer's path from Qordoba

1. Habib co-founded Qordoba in 2015 with Wassim after they met in Dubai and moved to San Francisco. The company began in machine translation.
2. When Qordoba's models began generating English, the pair decided to rebuild the company as Writer.
3. They sunset Qordoba's revenue over about eighteen months.