Generative artificial intelligence platform Writer announced Tuesday (Nov. 12) that it raised $200 million in funding, reflecting a broader shift as businesses increasingly rely on AI to craft everything from product descriptions to marketing emails.
The investment values the AI writing company at $1.9 billion and points to a fundamental change in online commerce. Where teams of copywriters once labored to describe thousands of products, AI tools can now generate consistent, tailored content in minutes — although companies say they still need human oversight to maintain quality and brand voice.
“Marketers and content creators in commerce will be able to do a better job of tapping into customers’ psyches because of the amount of data marketers can finally organize and absolutely understand,” Eli Goodman, CEO and co-founder of Datos, a Semrush Company, told PYMNTS. “AI writing tools can help marketers not only gather data but also decode it, turning loads of raw information into meaningful insights. Imagine campaigns that feel like they were crafted for each individual, not just a broad segment.”
There’s a growing number of AI tools designed to support enterprise writing, making content creation, editing and management more efficient. Grammarly Business, for example, offers real-time grammar, style and tone adjustments that align with company standards, helping teams maintain consistency across documents. Jasper AI also assists marketing and sales teams by generating targeted copy based on data-driven prompts, boosting productivity and ensuring messaging aligns with brand guidelines.
Writer said in its funding announcement that it is seeing rapid adoption among Fortune 500 companies, with clients like Mars, Ally Bank, Salesforce, Uber and Prudential joining existing customers like Vanguard and Intuit. Writer customers are achieving an average nine times return on investment and saving millions of hours in productivity. The platform offers a full-stack generative AI solution that includes its proprietary Palmyra family of large language models, graph-based RAG and customizable AI guardrails.
The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate the development of AI solutions that can handle complex enterprise workflows across systems and teams. The company will focus on creating quick-start AI applications and agents for time-intensive workflows in healthcare, retail and financial services, per the announcement.
With generative AI tools becoming a staple in marketing and content creation, some industry leaders are seeing measurable gains in efficiency. Aaron Henry, founder and managing director at Foundeast Asia Co., an integrated marketing agency, told PYMNTS his firm adopted generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, DALL-E and Gemini, enhancing content marketing efficiency by about 20%.
The agency applies AI selectively, balancing the need for accuracy and intellectual property concerns. All AI-generated text undergoes extensive human editing and third-party verification. For design work, AI aids in pre-visualization and storyboarding, although final outputs are crafted by human designers, keeping the majority of the content creation process human-led.
“We see measurable results in, for example, our social performance for our clients,” he said. “For one client in the health sphere, for instance, our impressions on their LinkedIn company page have tripled over the past seven months. It would be oversimplifying to say this performance increase can be solely attributed to applying AI in our workflow, but it’s certainly one factor.”
As AI tools become more common in the writing process, industry experts are voicing concerns about their impact on essential skills. Julie Ferris-Tillman, vice president at Interdependence Public Relations, told PYMNTS that her main problem with AI writing is that it might tempt people to skip essential editing, risking a decline in valuable refinement skills. While AI content can be a helpful starting point in branding, relying too heavily on it could erode the “writing muscles” crucial to effective communication.
“Creative direction requires the strategic oversight of the team, deep knowledge of the space and the competition,” she said. “Helping an AI understand all those factors isn’t as efficient as keeping the brand voice, image and assets under the watchful eye of well-versed creative leaders. It takes great care to demonstrate potential with AI-generated words and images while still scaling the idea to fit clients’ needs.”
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