WORKING AI

BUSINESSES HAVE POURED MILLIONS INTO AI HOPING FOR BIG RETURNS IN THE FUTURE. THIS STARTUP IS SAVING THEM MILLIONS IN LABOR COSTS TODAY.

- BY RASHI SHRIVASTAVA AND KATHARINE SCHWAB

It was 2016, and May Habib was in the most important meeting of her life. The Lebanese-Canadian entrepreneur had just moved to San Francisco from Dubai and was pitching Visa on her startup’s translation software. To have any chance at a Series A, she needed to land the deal—and fast.

But Visa’s executives, who wanted to roll out a digital payment product in 40-plus languages, had only ever worked with human translators and didn’t understand how her software would integrate with theirs. So Habib, now 40, stepped up to a whiteboard and mapped it out. And when they discovered a gap, she and her cofounder, Waseem Alshikh, went back to their house-cum-office in the Mission District and cranked out a GitHub integration to fill it.

Visa became Habib’s first major enterprise client with a $126,000 contract soon after, and she raised $5 million a few months later. “You're not selling your software, you're selling a different way of doing things,” she says.

That's the conceit behind Writer, Habib’s artificial intelligence company, which has evolved dramatically since those early days. It now sells AI Studio, a Swiss Army knife suite of AI tools intended to expedite the corporate world’s many simple, but often tedious and expensive, menial tasks. For cosmetics giant L’Oréal, Writer drafted thousands of product description blurbs, for Uber hundreds of answers to frequently asked questions. Salesforce uses it to quickly gin up email and social media marketing campaigns. Those are just three of the 300 companies that pay—sometimes millions—to use Writer's customizable AI apps to automate time-consuming everyday work. The enthusiastic embrace of enterprise has helped Writer, one of the sizzling startups featured on Forbes’ annual AI 50 list (