The hottest party for generative AI is productivity apps

As search AI chatbots took off, like the debut of Microsoft’s Bing bot and the launch of Google’s Bard , who knew that the hottest, trendiest party for generative AI would be… business productivity apps?

After years of being relegated to wallflower AI status as self-driving cars, robot dogs, and the future of an AI-powered metaverse came under the spotlight, generative AI’s email-writing, blogging, and copywriting capabilities have suddenly become popular. And the best companies, from startups to Big Tech, are developing tools to enter the generative AI bash.

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Enter GrammarlyGo

San Francisco-based Grammarly is a fashionably late arrival to this generative AI night. The browser plug-in digital writing assistant is far from new to artificial intelligence, but today the company announced its GPT-based, chatbot-style GrammarlyGo. The new offering will go into beta for its 30 million daily customers and Grammarly Business’ 50,000 teams in early April.

Touting what it calls “enterprise-grade” security precautions, GrammarlyGo offers users quick prompts to write text, reply to emails, set a preferred writing voice, brainstorm ideas, and receive suggestions.

“This is a fundamentally new way for people to interact with Grammarly,” Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, head of global product at Grammarly, told VentureBeat during a presentation this week. “We’re very excited.”

The crowded dance floor of generative artificial intelligence productivity

But GrammarlyGo has basically stepped onto a packed generative AI dance floor with a hip DJ getting the crowd pumping. And in many cases, the party people all wear the same clothes, with ChatGPT-like bots, adorable names, and only the latest and friendliest UX.

San Francisco-based Writer, for example, looks small, but it’s huge: it’s focused specifically on the enterprise space and boasts clients like UnitedHealthcare, Accenture, Intuit, and Spotify. Billing itself as a “full-stack generative AI platform for business,” CEO May Habib points out that Writer is not built on LLMs (large language models) like OpenAI GPT-3 or ChatGPT, but launched three proprietary LLMs last month. for “enterprise-ready generative AI”.

Writer offers the same generative AI features as GrammarlyGo and other tools, along with the ability to enforce editorial rules and keep your messages on brand. Additionally, Habib says Writer recently beat out Grammarly, as well as competitors like OpenAI and Jasper, “fairly” by signing Uber as a client.

“I told the team, ‘This is going to be the first of many, because where Uber’s CIO goes, everyone goes,’” he told VentureBeat.

Speaking of Jasper… and HubSpot… and Salesforce… and…

Speaking of Jasper, the Austin, Texas-based generative AI darling who threw his own generative AI party — ok, conference — last month isn’t resting on his corporate productivity laurels. A few weeks ago, it released Jasper for Business, which could lead to a serious dance (oops, app) battle.

And this week, two CRM leaders kicked off the party on the sales and marketing side: On Monday, HubSpot debuted ChatSpot, which combines HubSpot’s proprietary technology with OpenAI ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, and Google Docs apps. , such as Google Sheets and Google Slides. Salesforce on Tuesday launched Einstein GPT, which helps users automatically generate content, respond to emails, create marketing messages and develop knowledge base articles to improve the customer experience.

A number of other generative AI players are also gaining ground in business productivity. There’s AI21 Labs’ popular Wordtune – the new Spices version launched in January lets you choose from 12 different cues that generate a range of textual options to complete and improve sentences.

And the party isn’t over yet! Canva introduced new generative AI-powered tools in December. Hyperwrite, powered by OpenAI rival Cohere AI, wants to take over your email. Startup Typeface came out of stealth yesterday.

High tech productivity is an AI tap dance

Microsoft kicked off its own generative AI CRM event this week when it announced Copilot, which is “currently in testing” for the company’s Dynamics 365 enterprise suite. In addition to building chatbots for customer service, it can help marketers create fresh email content for campaigns.

On March 16, CEO Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of modern workplace and business applications, will host a virtual event called Future of Work with AI where customers can “share how AI is developing a whole new way of working . it works for all people and organizations.” Hmm… is Bing’s chatbot coming to Word? Outlook? PowerPoint? Will an old fashioned Clippy do the Humpty Dance?

Google, of course, fell asleep in the early hours of the generative AI festivities. But Bloomberg reported yesterday that a new internal directive requires “generative artificial intelligence” to be built into all of its biggest products within months. Google Docs, anyone? Let the party begin!

Finally, there’s OpenAI and ChatGPT in the corner – too cool for this party, waving fans away with a grin saying, “Just check out the API – there’s probably a hackathon next weekend.”

There’s room for everyone at this generative AI party

Grammarly’s Roy-Chowdhury says there’s room for everyone at this generative AI party.

“I’m happy with the interest in the space, I think it’s great,” he said. “I think it’s healthy, it’s great for consumers, it keeps us on our toes.”

Still, he pointed to areas where he believes Grammarly excels, such as a browser extension that allows Grammarly to be accessed from any app and a history of responsible deployment of AI systems.

Finally, there’s the fact that many users are simply happy with Grammarly — for those who prefer Netflix and chill, so to speak, to partying.

In any case, there’s no doubt that the generative AI business productivity party will be hopping for a while. But experts say the cool kids will eventually move on to the real generative AI killer use case, knowledge management.

So if you’re tired of this season’s hottest AI party, don’t worry: sit down to this song and get ready for the next one.