Bringing Gen AI to Grammarly Business

Like many SAAS companies in 2023, Grammarly needed to reimagine itself in a GenAI world. As market pressures required us to act quickly, we leveraged existing research to ensure our efforts were focused on solving real customer problems.

Effective AI design requires close collaboration. Product designers must ensure user needs are at the forefront of the conversation and work closely with engineers to understand AI's ever-growing capabilities.

Our initial efforts focused on helping customers become more effective communicators in the workplace. The screen below shows how a customer can make the generated text more persuasive, assertive, or confident. They can do the same with the text they generate.

However, it was clear that the greatest value and differentiation could be achieved in the space only if our LLMs could understand the workplace context. Take any random conversation in the workplace — it likely sounds like Martian to those outside the company. Without understanding this context, LLMs will only be marginally helpful within the workplace.

We began a series of hypothesis-driven experiments to understand how Grammarly LLMs can provide value above and beyond publicly available LLMs. This required a fast-paced Lean UX approach. Results from these experiments were promising and knowledge workers’ ways of working will dramatically change as products like Grammarly continue to learn to leverage context to provide assistance.