Author, a San Francisco-based synthetic intelligence startup, is launching a unified AI agent platform designed to let any worker automate advanced enterprise workflows with out writing code — a functionality the corporate says distinguishes it from consumer-oriented instruments like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.
The platform, known as Author Agent, combines chat-based help with autonomous process execution in a single interface. Beginning Tuesday, enterprise clients can use pure language to instruct the AI to create displays, analyze monetary knowledge, generate advertising and marketing campaigns, or coordinate throughout a number of enterprise methods like Salesforce, Slack, and Google Workspace—then save these workflows as reusable "Playbooks" that run routinely on schedules.
The announcement comes as enterprises wrestle to maneuver AI initiatives past pilot packages into manufacturing at scale. Author CEO Might Habib has been outspoken about this problem, lately revealing that 42% of Fortune 500 executives surveyed by her firm mentioned AI is "tearing their company apart" attributable to coordination failures between departments.
"We're delivering an agent interface that is both incredibly powerful and radically simple to transform individual productivity into organizational impact," Habib mentioned in a press release. "Writer Agent is the difference between a single sales rep asking a chatbot to write an outreach email and an enterprise ensuring that 1,000 reps are all sending on-brand, compliant, and contextually-aware messages to target accounts."
How Author is placing workflow automation within the palms of non-technical employees
The platform's core innovation facilities on making workflow automation accessible to non-technical staff—what Author executives name "democratizing who gets to be a builder."
In an unique interview with VentureBeat, Doris Jwo, Author's director of product administration, demonstrated how the system works: A consumer sorts a request in plain English — for instance, "Create a two-page partnership proposal between [Company A] and [Company B], make it a branded deck, include impact metrics and partnership tiers."
The AI agent then breaks down that request into discrete steps, conducts internet analysis, generates graphics and charts on the fly, creates particular person slides with sourced info, and assembles an entire presentation. All the course of, which could take an worker hours or days, might be accomplished in 10-12 minutes.
"The agent basically looks at the request, breaks it down, does research, understands what pieces it needs, creates a detailed plan at a step-by-step level," Jwo defined throughout a product demonstration. "It might say, 'I need to do web research,' or 'This user needs information from Gong or Slack,' and it reaches out to those connectors, grabs the data, and executes the plan."
Crucially, customers can save these multi-step processes as Playbooks—reusable templates that colleagues can deploy with a single click on. Routines enable these Playbooks to run routinely at scheduled intervals, primarily placing data work "on autopilot."
Safety and compliance controls: Author's reply to enterprise IT issues
Author positions these enterprise-focused controls as a key differentiator from opponents. Whereas Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic provide highly effective AI capabilities, Author's executives argue these instruments weren't designed from the bottom up for the safety, compliance, and governance necessities of enormous regulated organizations.
"All of the products you mentioned are great products, but even Copilot is very much focused on personal productivity—summarizing email, for example, which is important, but that's not the component we're focusing on," mentioned Matan-Paul Shetrit, Author's director of product administration, in an unique interview with VentureBeat.
Shetrit emphasised Author's "trust, security, and interoperability" strategy. IT directors can granularly management what the AI can entry — as an illustration, stopping market analysis brokers from mentioning opponents, or limiting which staff can use internet search capabilities. All exercise is logged with detailed audit trails exhibiting precisely what knowledge the agent touched and what actions it took.
"These fine-grained controls are what make products enterprise-ready," Shetrit mentioned. "We can deploy to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees while maintaining the security and guardrails you need for that scale."
This structure displays Author's origin story. In contrast to OpenAI or Anthropic, which began as analysis labs and later added enterprise choices, Author has focused Fortune 500 corporations since its 2020 founding. "We're not a research lab that went to consumer and is dabbling in enterprise," Shetrit mentioned. "We are first and foremost targeting the Global 2000 and Fortune 500, and our research is in service of these customers' needs."
Inside Author's technique to attach AI brokers throughout enterprise software program methods
A crucial technical element is Author's strategy to system integrations. The platform contains pre-built connectors to greater than a dozen enterprise purposes—Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Snowflake, Asana, Slack, Gong, HubSpot, Atlassian, Databricks, PitchBook, and FactSet—permitting the AI to retrieve info and take actions throughout these methods.
Author constructed these connectors utilizing the Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP), an rising commonplace for AI system integrations, however added what Shetrit described as an "enterprise-ready" layer on high.
"We took a first-principle approach of: You have this MCP connector infrastructure—how do you build it in a way that's enterprise-ready?" Shetrit defined. "What we have today in the industry is definitely not it."
The system can write and execute code on the fly to deal with surprising situations. If a consumer uploads an unfamiliar file format, as an illustration, the agent will generate code to extract and course of the textual content with out requiring a human to intervene.
Jwo demonstrated this functionality with a each day workflow she runs: Each morning at 10 a.m., a Routine routinely summarizes her Google Calendar conferences, identifies exterior individuals, finds their LinkedIn profiles, and sends the abstract to her by way of Slack — all with out her involvement.
"This was pretty simple, but you can imagine for a salesperson it might say, 'At the end of the day, wrap up a summary of all the calls I had, send me action items, post it to the account-specific Slack channel, and tag these folks so they can accomplish those workflows,'" Jwo mentioned. "That can run continuously each day, each week, or on demand."
From mortgage lenders to CPG manufacturers: Actual-world AI agent use circumstances throughout industries
The platform is attracting clients throughout a number of industries. New American Funding, a mortgage lender, makes use of Author Agent to automate advertising and marketing workflows. Senior Content material Advertising and marketing Supervisor Karen Rodriguez uploads Asana venture tickets with inventive briefs, and the AI executes duties like updating e-mail campaigns or reworking articles into social media carousels, video scripts, and captions.
Different use circumstances span monetary companies groups creating funding dashboards with PitchBook and FactSet knowledge, shopper packaged items corporations brainstorming new product traces primarily based on social media traits, and advertising and marketing groups producing partnership displays with branded property.
Author has added clients together with TikTok, Comcast, Keurig Dr Pepper, CAA, and Aptitude Well being, becoming a member of an present base that features Accenture, Qualcomm, Uber, Vanguard, and Marriott. The corporate now serves greater than 300 enterprises and has secured over $50 million in signed contracts, with projections to double that to $100 million this yr.
The startup's web retention price — a measure of how a lot present clients broaden their utilization — stands at 160%, that means clients on common enhance their spending by 60% after preliminary contracts. Twenty clients who began with $200,000-$300,000 contracts now spend about $1 million yearly, in accordance with firm knowledge.
'Vibe working': Author's imaginative and prescient for AI-powered productiveness past coding
Author executives body the platform as enabling what they name "vibe working" — a playful reference to the favored time period "vibe coding," which describes AI instruments like Cursor that dramatically speed up software program growth.
"We used to call it transformation when we took 12 steps and made them nine. That's optimizing the world as it is," Habib mentioned at Author's AI Leaders Discussion board earlier this month, in accordance with Forbes. "We can now create a new world. That is the greenfield mindset."
Shetrit echoed this framing: "Vibe coding is the theme of 2025. Our view is that ‘vibe working’ is the theme of 2026. How do you bring the same productivity gains you've seen with coding agents into the workspace in a way that non-technical users can maximize them?"
The platform is powered by Palmyra X5, Author's proprietary massive language mannequin that includes a one-million-token context window — among the many largest commercially obtainable. Author skilled the mannequin for about $700,000, a fraction of the estimated $100 million OpenAI spent on GPT-4, by utilizing artificial knowledge and methods that halt coaching when returns diminish.
The mannequin can course of a million tokens in about 22 seconds and prices 60 cents per million enter tokens and $6 per million output tokens — considerably cheaper than comparable choices, in accordance with firm specs.
Making AI Choices Seen: Author's Strategy to Belief and Transparency
A particular side of Author's strategy is transparency into the AI's decision-making course of. The interface shows the agent's step-by-step reasoning, exhibiting which knowledge sources it accessed, what code it generated, and the way it arrived at outputs.
"There's a very clear exhibition of how the agent is thinking, what it's doing, what it's touching," Shetrit mentioned. "This is important for the end user to trust it, but also important for the IT person or security professional to see what's going on."
This "supervision" mannequin goes past easy observability of API calls to embody what Shetrit described as "a superset of observability" — giving organizations the flexibility to not simply monitor however management AI habits by way of insurance policies and permissions.
Session logs seize all agent exercise when enabled by directors, and customers can submit suggestions on each output to assist enhance system efficiency. The platform additionally emphasizes offering sources and citations for generated content material, permitting customers to confirm info.
"With any sort of chat assistant, agentic or not, trust but verify is really important," Jwo mentioned. "That's part of the pillars of us building this and making it enterprise-grade."
What Author Agent Prices—and Why It's Included within the Base Platform
Author is together with all the brand new capabilities—Playbooks, Routines, Connectors, and Character customization—as a part of its core platform with out extra prices, in accordance with Jwo.
"This is fully included as part of the Writer platform," she mentioned. "We're not charging additional for using Writer Agent."
The "Personality" characteristic permits particular person customers, groups, or complete organizations to customise the AI's communication type, guaranteeing generated content material matches model voice and tone tips. This works alongside company-level controls that implement terminology and magnificence necessities.
For extremely structured, repetitive duties, Author additionally affords a library of greater than 100 pre-built brokers and an AI Studio for constructing customized multi-agent methods aligned with particular enterprise use circumstances.
The Race to Outline Enterprise AI: Can Function-Constructed Platforms Beat Tech Giants?
The launch crystallizes a basic pressure in how enterprises will undertake AI at scale. Whereas consumer-facing AI instruments emphasize particular person productiveness good points, corporations want methods that work reliably throughout 1000’s of staff, combine with present software program infrastructure, keep regulatory compliance, and ship measurable enterprise influence.
Author's wager is that these necessities demand purpose-built enterprise platforms slightly than shopper instruments tailored for enterprise use. The corporate's $1.9 billion valuation — achieved in a November 2024 funding spherical that raised $200 million — suggests buyers see benefit on this thesis. Backers embrace Premji Make investments, Radical Ventures, ICONIQ Progress, Salesforce Ventures, and Adobe Ventures.
But the aggressive panorama stays formidable. Microsoft and Google command monumental distribution benefits by way of their present enterprise software program relationships. OpenAI and Anthropic possess analysis capabilities which have produced breakthrough fashions. Whether or not Author can keep its differentiation as these giants broaden their enterprise choices will take a look at the startup's core premise: that serving Fortune 500 corporations from day one creates benefits that analysis labs turned enterprise distributors can not simply replicate.
"We're entering an era where if you can describe a better way to work, you can build it," Jwo mentioned. "The new Writer Agent democratizes who gets to be a builder, empowering the operational experts and creative problem-solvers in every department to become the architects of their own transformation. That's how you unlock innovation that competitors can't replicate."
The promise is alluring — AI capabilities highly effective sufficient to rework how work will get accomplished, accessible sufficient for any worker to make use of, and managed sufficient for enterprises to deploy safely at scale. Whether or not Author can ship on that promise on the pace and scale required will decide if its imaginative and prescient of "vibe working" turns into the 2026 theme Shetrit predicts, or simply one other formidable try to resolve enterprise AI's execution downside.
However one factor is for certain: In a market the place 85% of AI initiatives fail to flee pilot purgatory, Author is betting that the winners gained't be the businesses with probably the most highly effective fashions—they'll be those that make these fashions really work contained in the enterprise.
