Building an AI Platform for the Future

Shishir Mehrotra joined Grammarly as CEO fol- lowing its December 2024 acquisition of Coda, the AI productivity platform he founded in 2014. The MIT graduate began his career by cofounding Centrata and subsequently spent several years at Microsoft and then at Google as vice president of product for YouTube. MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with Mehrotra about navigating his unique lead- ership transition, building what he envisions as the AI platform of the future, and management rituals, which he's writing a book about. What follows are edited highlights from that conversation.

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What led to Grammarly's acquisition of Coda and you taking on the CEO role?

Grammarly is a much larger business than most people realize — it has over 40 million daily active users and over $700 million in revenue, largely bootstrapped and generating cash for a long time. People think Grammarly is mostly about grammar-checking. But actually, its core technology is the ability to bring AI agents right to your applications.