Grammarly looks to evolve into an always-on desktop AI agent

Grammarly is reinventing itself as a platform of generative AI (genAI) agents that go beyond grammar recommendations.

The company is building always-on AI technologies that follow users across work applications and can coordinate projects, write documents and automate workflows.  The growth is partially fueled by a cash infusion of $1 billion from General Catalyst last month.

Users will be able to have deeper conversations with, and get recommendations from, a variety of AI tools that draw context from documents and action. The company hopes the tools will attract power users who want more than automatic recommendations.

“We’re going to be able to give you much more feedback than, ‘Here are correct words,’” Noam Lovinsky, chief product officer at Grammarly, told Computerworld. “We’ll be able to give you feedback from experts that you care about. We’ll be able to help you right from start to finish.”

For example, an agent could access Zoom transcripts from candidate interviews and create draft scorecards.

“Maybe at the end of that process, Grammarly says, ‘Actually, I have this agent. And if you want, I can like create a draft for you of every single score card the minute you get off of the Zoom,’” Lovinsky said.

Grammarly can take that further in its Coda team workspace tool. It can automate that post-Zoom workflow by generating a table of all interviews, linking transcripts, and generating draft responses. Users can review and refine the drafts before sending the data to hiring systems such as Greenhouse.

“That is almost like the common interface layer by which all the agents are going to get to show up. They’ll come to your applications the same way that Grammarly does today,” Lovinsky said.

Lovinsky offered another example of how Grammarly tools will work with popular collaboration tools from Slack and Atlassian. “If you’re writing a status update for a project, we’ll actually know the latest things that have been said in Slack about that project and the latest Jira tickets that have been filed, so we can help you coalesce those things and create a good update.”

Grammarly claims 40 million users and supports 500,000-plus applications and websites. Its tools typically slip into the user interface without disturbing the flow of work, which is what the company wants to continue.

“You just install it and it just works, and you just go do your thing and we show up in the right ways and in the right moments,” Lovinsky said.

The genAI technologies will include a companion that can go deeper into context, which could appeal to power users. “If you want more than just what shows up in the underlines, if you want deeper work with more back and forth, we’ll have a companion that opens up and works with every application,” Lovinsky said.

Grammarly appears to have thought about what technology it has that it could build on to offer a differentiated genAI tool, said Nancy Gohring, senior research director for AI at IDC. “What it landed on was the platform it had already created that allowed the original Grammarly application to work across third-party applications,” she said.  

Grammarly’s advantage comes from leveraging its existing platform as a way to offer a range of agents that work across the third-party apps already deployed in the enterprise, Gohring said.

But it will also compete with numerous companies delivering similar tools. Microsoft and Google already provide document drafting and automation AI agents. Users rely on large-language models (LLMs) for grammar and error correction.

But with LLMs, users must cut, paste, and prompt to get answers. Grammarly wants to ease that burden by working within the user interface and automatically understanding the right context.

“What I want to do is create an interface that doesn’t require you to prompt and re-prompt until you get your output,” Lovinsky said. “It just works.”

Grammarly builds its own LLMs, but also uses commercial AI providers. Users cannot explicitly choose their model, but that limitation could change.

“I think we’re going to change that because there are more sophisticated users,” Lovinsky said. “What they really like is that we bring it inline.”

The company plans to focus on tools for knowledge workers in the wider market and not target specific domains. “You’re not going to see us do a lot in coding, data analysis, or design work,” Lovinsky said.

There are already many rivals on the market that aim to allow for agent development, management and collaboration, IDC’s Gohring said.

“Grammarly will need to clearly articulate how it’s different and how it fits adjacent to the others,” she said.Global Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Teams and Exchange services – ComputerworldRead More