In her words
The vast majority of teams that are trying to build generative AI applications are approaching it like they would traditional software development, and we think that’s kind of like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Generative AI challenges the concept of done. You need the ability to continuously be building and monitoring.
Biography
May Habib emigrated from Lebanon as a child, grew up in Canada, and graduated from Harvard before an early career in finance. Her first startup, Qordoba, tackled machine translation and localization; in 2020 she and co-founder Waseem Alshikh relaunched the business as Writer, a full-stack generative-AI platform for enterprises — building its own family of language models rather than reselling others’.
Selling AI to the Fortune 500
Writer became one of enterprise AI’s breakout companies, with customers from Vanguard to L’Oréal and a $200 million Series C in November 2024 that valued it at $1.9 billion. Habib is a relentless evangelist for putting generative AI into real workflows, telling Runtime in March 2025 that agentic AI was “the straw that broke the enterprise’s back” — the moment companies realized they could not build everything themselves. She is equally blunt about the hype cycle, saying Writer soft-pedals its own ROI numbers because “no CIO is going to believe 50x ROI.”
Habib’s public case for AI is operational rather than utopian: she argues the winners will be companies that treat generative AI as a continuous discipline, not a finished product. That framing — pragmatic, deployment-first, allergic to both doom and vaporware — has made her a fixture of enterprise-AI coverage in Fortune and Forbes.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/may-habib