May Habib co-founded Writer in 2020 alongside Waseem Alshikh, building the company around a distinctive strategic choice: developing its own proprietary large language model family, Palmyra, rather than building purely as a wrapper around third-party models. As CEO, Habib has positioned this in-house model approach as giving Writer more control over enterprise data handling and model behavior than competitors dependent on outside model providers.
Habib has steered Writer's product positioning from an early focus on AI-assisted content generation toward a broader "agentic AI for the enterprise" framing, reflecting the wider industry shift toward AI systems that take multi-step actions rather than simply generating text.