Q&A with the CEO of Enterprise AI Platform WRITER

Work & Co

WRITER started in content automation and has since evolved into autonomous agents that complete complex work across teams and tools. Can you walk us through what it takes to stay ahead of each wave?

May Habib

The way we measure ourselves is by whether our customers are moving faster, thinking bigger, and doing things they couldn’t do before. When you’re that obsessed with your customers, you’re always thinking about your next model release, your next product release, the next wave of capability you can put in their hands. And in this industry, those waves come fast. The pace of change is just relentless and demands continuous reinvention. Product-market fit has to be repeatedly earned.

Internally, our ability to move at this pace is something we’ve coined as moving at “WRITER Speed”. It goes back to a decision Waseem and I made back in 2020 to own the full stack. We’ve never been waiting on anyone else’s roadmap and that’s completely by design. We built our own models and all the scaffolding around them – the governance, the brand controls, the IT control and visibility. All of it baked in from the start. So every time there’s a leap in what the underlying technology can do, we’re not just the first to take it to the enterprise, but we do it in a way that actually holds up.

Five years in, I’d say we’re inside the revenue engine — inside the mission-critical workflows companies can’t afford to get wrong. It’s a major milestone that we’ve built autonomous systems enterprises trust with their brands, their data, and company reputations. That’s not a given in this industry. We’ve had to fight for that and we’ll continue to fight for that.

Work & Co

With those autonomous systems, you draw a hard line between governed autonomy and unchecked autonomy. What’s needed for enterprises to actually scale agentic AI across an organization?

May Habib

The way we measure ourselves is by whether our customers are moving faster, thinking bigger, and doing things they couldn’t do before. Business users who’d never written a line of code a year ago are now building things regularly.  

At the same time, it’s also the Wild West. Multiple tools running in parallel, hard to keep track of what’s being built, what data is going where, and who approved what. And the second something unplanned happens, the red tape goes up and the whole initiative might go on ice. 

I do believe many people do really want autonomy. The CMOs I’m working with right now are some of the most creatively ambitious people I’ve ever met. They want to take the big swings, attack projects they’ve never had the bandwidth for, and push into channels they’ve never been able to scale. But it’s no surprise that they don’t want the unchecked part of autonomy given they spent 20 years building and defending their brand. They aren’t the ones who want to be responsible for exposing the company to a compliance issue. 

The biggest way trust gets built is when the agent works the way you would work. It knows your standards, follows your processes, represents your brand the way your best person would. When you’ve got a platform where the business users are encoding their work and IT has the visibility and control they need, that red tape comes off and the really amazing, transformational things start getting built. I see real-world examples every day, ones like a CPG brand deploying agents that generate product copy across every brand in their portfolio, and updating it based on the season or the latest TikTok trend.  

Work & Co

You’ve talked about how deployment, not the model, is the hard part. When Song‘s creative and experience teams work alongside WRITER, what does that collaboration actually look like for the client?

May Habib

Deployment is hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t actually done it, or they haven’t done it right. And yet there’s no shortage of AI companies who walk in like heroes, hand over a contract, and are never seen again.  

We’ve just never operated that way. From day one, we are working shoulder-to-shoulder with our customers. We’re in the room together, mapping out workflows and we help find the champions inside the organization, run the workshops, and host the hackathons. Some of my favorite deployments are shared customers with Song, because what we’re really trying to do is help these companies reimagine what it means to be an AI-native organization. That’s a people problem, a process problem, and a change management problem as much as it’s a technology problem. What happens to this workflow when agents cut it down from 54 steps to six? How do team roles evolve? Song brings this incredible depth of understanding about what it takes to move giant companies and can work with us to navigate all stakeholders, along with the change resistance. 

Together we can go deep inside these organizations. Deep into use case mapping, building super custom playbooks, helping end users actually build confidence with WRITER. We’ve done full-blown transformations of 500-person teams in 12 weeks. You just don’t see that when your vendor hands over a contract and disappears. 

Work & Co

As agents become more integrated into the customer experience itself, what changes about how brand and agency teams design and deliver those experiences? And can you share where are you seeing it make a real difference in the customer journey?

May Habib

Think about how a lot of brands operate. Your content team is one corner, a product team in another, campaign team in another, social is doing their own thing, sales completely on the other side of the wall. Everyone’s doing great work, but it’s siloed. So you spend months planning, briefing, reviewing, approving for the first launch, and then you immediately start another project.  

But those silos dissolve with agents. It’s possible to orchestrate the whole thing now, across more touchpoints, and be responsive to what’s happening with your customers in real time. That’s a completely different way to think of marketing. We’re seeing a shift from “going to market” to always “being in market.”  

What gets unlocked downstream for the actual customer experience is where it gets really magical. Your brand intelligence, your best messaging, your voice doesn’t stop at the asset anymore. It travels with the customer. A salesperson in Miami walks into a meeting actually equipped with what your design, product, or marketing team knows. The feedback from that meeting gets instantly fed back into your messaging. The whole loop moves at a speed it just never could before. 

Work & Co

If a client is sitting here today, still in the exploratory phase, what’s the one thing you’d want them to walk away understanding about what becomes possible with agentic — and the risk if they wait?

May Habib

We have this thing we do with executive teams we call “shock and awe.” We walk in with their single biggest pain point, the one that’s been sitting on someone’s whiteboard for two years, and we build it live, right there in the room. Something everyone assumed would take months gets done in days. Even the most skeptical people in those rooms go quiet.  

And the companies that walk out of that room and actually go start — pick another workflow, connect it to real data, build something that matters — now have something that you can’t buy. They’ve seen what AI can do. What I’d say to those that are in a bit of limbo around their agentic strategies is that the leverage in seeing the possibilities of agentic compounds. Every quarter they’re operating without it, the delta gets bigger.