AGENT OF CHANGE

MEET MAY HABIB, AN UNDER-THE-RADAR VISIONARY WHO QUIETLY BUILT THE GOLD STANDARD FOR ENTERPRISE AI, AND A CLIENT LIST THAT'S THE ENVY OF SILICON VALLEY.

- BY ELLEN MCGIRT

It’s a cold and rainy Friday afternoon at the Writer offices in London, and the gloom of early January has fully set in. Still, the company’s co-founder and CEO, May Habib, is in high spirits, enjoying a rare travel respite in what has now become her home city. “My husband’s British, so we put our kids in school in England. We've got a lot of family help here.” It’s a village in which they thrive, she says, something she values a great deal.

Still, Habib, who has been described as a force of nature, takes no notice of the seasonal slump all around her.

Between bites of takeout salad, she chats with staffers and confers with Writer’s recent big hire, its first-ever chief customer officer, Mina Alaghband, an enterprise AI-adoption expert most recently from McKinsey whom Habib had been hoping to recruit for the better part of a decade. For Habib, who in November 2024 navigated the company through a Series C investment and into a $1.9 billion valuation, the horizon seems particularly sunny. “Twenty twenty-six is going to be our year,” she says.

Writer is the hype-free AI platform for the corporate crowd; it’s also a company you're unlikely to have heard of unless you work for a big company with complex, often siloed workflows, and aggressive, if still uncertain, plans to leverage AI for business growth. Once focused solely on content generation, Writer has evolved to establish a beachhead in agentic AI—autonomous agents that can handle complex business processes even in highly regulated industries—and has been on a tear ever since.