AI Agents: Your Ultimate Work Assistants

San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup, Writer, is revolutionizing the way enterprises automate complex business workflows with the launch of its unified AI agent platform, Writer Agent. This platform allows any employee, regardless of technical background, to automate tasks without writing a single line of code — a feature that sets it apart from other consumer-oriented tools like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.

Writer Agent combines chat-based assistance with autonomous task execution in a single interface, giving enterprise customers the ability to use natural language to instruct the AI to perform a wide range of tasks, from creating presentations and analyzing financial data to generating marketing campaigns and coordinating across multiple business systems such as Salesforce, Slack, and Google Workspace. These workflows can be saved as reusable “Playbooks” that run automatically on schedules, streamlining processes and increasing productivity.

The platform’s core innovation lies in its focus on making workflow automation accessible to non-technical employees, allowing them to become builders in their own right. By breaking down complex requests into discrete steps, conducting research, generating content, and assembling complete presentations in a matter of minutes, Writer Agent empowers users to create detailed plans and execute tasks efficiently.

Writer’s emphasis on security and compliance controls further distinguishes it from its competitors, ensuring that IT administrators can maintain granular control over what data the AI can access and what actions it can take. Detailed audit trails provide transparency and accountability, making Writer Agent a trusted solution for large regulated organizations.

With pre-built connectors to over a dozen enterprise applications, Writer Agent seamlessly integrates with existing systems, allowing the AI to retrieve information and take actions across multiple platforms. This connectivity, combined with the platform’s ability to write and execute code on the fly, enables users to automate tasks seamlessly and handle unexpected scenarios with ease.

From mortgage lenders to CPG brands, Writer Agent is attracting customers from a variety of industries who are looking to streamline their workflows and increase productivity. By putting workflow automation in the hands of non-technical workers, Writer is paving the way for a future where AI-powered assistants transform individual productivity into organizational impact. Senior Content Marketing Manager Karen Rodriguez uploads Asana project tickets with creative briefs, and the AI executes tasks like updating email campaigns or transforming articles into social media carousels, video scripts, and captions. Other use cases span financial services teams creating investment dashboards with PitchBook and FactSet data, consumer packaged goods companies brainstorming new product lines based on social media trends, and marketing teams generating partnership presentations with branded assets.

Writer has added customers including TikTok, Comcast, Keurig Dr Pepper, CAA, and Aptitude Health, joining an existing base that includes Accenture, Qualcomm, Uber, Vanguard, and Marriott. The company now serves more than 300 enterprises and has secured over $50 million in signed contracts, with projections to double that to $100 million this year.

The startup’s net retention rate — a measure of how much existing customers expand their usage — stands at 160%, meaning customers on average increase their spending by 60% after initial contracts. Twenty customers who started with $200,000-$300,000 contracts now spend about $1 million annually, according to company data.

‘Vibe working’: Writer’s vision for AI-powered productivity beyond coding

Writer executives frame the platform as enabling what they call “vibe working” — a playful reference to the popular term “vibe coding,” which describes AI tools like Cursor that dramatically accelerate software development.

“We used to call it transformation when we took 12 steps and made them nine. That’s optimizing the world as it is,” Habib said at Writer’s AI Leaders Forum earlier this month, according to Forbes. “We can now create a new world. That is the greenfield mindset.”

Shetrit echoed this framing: “Vibe coding is the theme of 2025. Our view is that ‘vibe working’ is the theme of 2026. How do you bring the same productivity gains you’ve seen with coding agents into the workspace in a way that non-technical users can maximize them?”

The platform is powered by Palmyra X5, Writer’s proprietary large language model featuring a one-million-token context window — among the largest commercially available. Writer trained the model for approximately $700,000, a fraction of the estimated $100 million OpenAI spent on GPT-4, by using synthetic data and techniques that halt training when returns diminish.

The model can process one million tokens in about 22 seconds and costs 60 cents per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens — significantly cheaper than comparable offerings, according to company specifications.

Making AI Decisions Visible: Writer’s Approach to Trust and Transparency

A distinctive aspect of Writer’s approach is transparency into the AI’s decision-making process. The interface displays the agent’s step-by-step reasoning, showing which data sources it accessed, what code it generated, and how it arrived at outputs.

“There’s a very clear exhibition of how the agent is thinking, what it’s doing, what it’s touching,” Shetrit said. “This is important for the end user to trust it, but also important for the IT person or security professional to see what’s going on.”

This “supervision” model goes beyond simple observability of API calls to encompass what Shetrit described as “a superset of observability” — giving organizations the ability to not just monitor but control AI behavior through policies and permissions.

Session logs capture all agent activity when enabled by administrators, and users can submit feedback on every output to help improve system performance. The platform also emphasizes providing sources and citations for generated content, allowing users to verify information.

“With any sort of chat assistant, agentic or not, trust but verify is really important,” Jwo said. “That’s part of the pillars of us building this and making it enterprise-grade.”

What Writer Agent Costs—and Why It’s Included in the Base Platform

Writer is including all the new capabilities—Playbooks, Routines, Connectors, and Personality customization—as part of its core platform without additional charges, according to Jwo.

“This is fully included as part of the Writer platform,” she said. “We’re not charging additional for using Writer Agent.”

The “Personality” feature allows individual users, teams, or entire organizations to customize the AI’s communication style, ensuring generated content matches brand voice and tone guidelines. This works alongside company-level controls that enforce terminology and style requirements.

For highly structured, repetitive tasks, Writer also offers a library of more than 100 pre-built agents and an AI Studio for building custom multi-agent systems aligned with specific business use cases.

The Race to Define Enterprise AI: Can Purpose-Built Platforms Beat Tech Giants?

The launch crystallizes a fundamental tension in how enterprises will adopt AI at scale. While consumer-facing AI tools emphasize individual productivity gains, companies need systems that work reliably across thousands of employees, integrate with existing software infrastructure, maintain regulatory compliance, and deliver measurable business impact.

Writer’s wager is that these requirements demand purpose-built enterprise platforms rather than consumer tools adapted for business use. The company’s $1.9 billion valuation — achieved in a November 2024 funding round that raised $200 million — suggests investors see merit in this thesis. Backers include Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Salesforce Ventures, and Adobe Ventures.

Yet the competitive landscape remains formidable. Microsoft and Google command enormous distribution advantages through their existing enterprise software relationships. OpenAI and Anthropic possess research capabilities that have produced breakthrough models. Whether Writer can maintain its differentiation as these giants expand their enterprise offerings will test the startup’s core premise: that serving Fortune 500 companies from day one creates advantages that research labs turned enterprise vendors cannot easily replicate.

“We’re entering an era where if you can describe a better way to work, you can build it,” Jwo said. “The new Writer Agent democratizes who gets to be a builder, empowering the operational experts and creative problem-solvers in every department to become the architects of their own transformation. That’s how you unlock innovation that competitors can’t replicate.”

The promise is alluring — AI capabilities powerful enough to transform how work gets done, accessible enough for any employee to use, and controlled enough for enterprises to deploy safely at scale. In the realm of enterprise AI, the success of Whether Writer hinges on its ability to deliver on its promise at the necessary speed and scale. This will ultimately determine whether its concept of “vibe working” will come to fruition as Shetrit predicts it will by 2026, or if it will simply be another ambitious but unsuccessful attempt to address the challenges faced by enterprise AI.

What is certain, however, is that in a landscape where a staggering 85% of AI initiatives fail to progress beyond the pilot stage, Writer is placing its bets on a different approach. Rather than focusing solely on developing the most powerful AI models, the company believes that the true winners will be those who can successfully implement and integrate these models within the enterprise environment.

The key to success lies in making AI solutions work seamlessly within the existing framework of an organization. This is where Whether Writer aims to differentiate itself, offering a unique value proposition that sets it apart from its competitors.

As businesses continue to grapple with the complexities of AI implementation, Writer is positioning itself as a solution provider that understands the challenges faced by enterprises. By prioritizing practicality and functionality over raw power, the company hopes to carve out a niche for itself in a crowded market.

Ultimately, the success of Whether Writer will be determined by its ability to deliver on its promises and help companies overcome the hurdles that have historically plagued AI initiatives. Whether it will emerge as a game-changer in the world of enterprise AI remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the company is betting on its unique approach to stand out in a fiercely competitive landscape.