Shishir Mehrotra on Superhuman: proactive AI that acts before you ask

waiting room for far too long. uh Shashir Meturora from Superhum, formerly Grammarly. We're going to break down [music] the uh the rebrand. We had him on when uh they acquired Superhum. Yes. Welcome to the stream. Doing congratulations on the next iteration. We pressed you about this.

We asked you, is there going to be a rebrand? And you were like nothing to announce. I think you did. Yeah, I think you [laughter] did. But congratulations. It's done. And it happened really fast actually. Uh many corporations would take its way. Take a year. I know I I don't know. It feels fast to me.

Uh but anyway, how's it going? What are the key changes? What's the thesis? Why' you go with Superhum and not Grammarly as the as the key hero brand? Yeah, that's uh that's great. Yeah, I I we did talk about it a few months back when we bought Superhum. Um the big there there's two big changes we made.

Uh we changed the name of the corporate entity to be superhuman instead of Grammarly. Um it's a little bit like the Google Alphabet transition. There's still Grammarly is still an important brand uh in our portfolio of products. Uh we now have four products under the superhuman brand.

It's Grammarly, it's KOD, it's male which you used to know as superhuman before. Uh and the other big announcement is we added a fourth new product we call go superhuman go. Uh which brings a uh new AI assistant product takes the best parts of Grammarly and makes it a platform. Okay.

Hey, wait, explain that more to me because um okay, one one before we jump into that, I will say superhuman is a perfect name for a suite of AI enabled apps at a time when a lot of humans, especially even I would say more so outside of the tech bubble are like worried about being obsolete in an age of AI.

And so this kind of ethos of like let's give people superpowers very strong. Makes a lot of sense. Exactly. Ex you nailed it. That's why we picked the name. I had two tests.

One was it need to be broad enough for the sweet first thing you said and the second one was actually the word human is more important than the word super. And it's actually part of the Grammarly DNA because Grammarly has always been about empowerment of humans.

You still, you know, we help you assist you in your writing task, but you still at the end of the day submit the the article, you you submit the essay, you write the email. Uh we're just helping you be more human. So I love the concept of uh uh superhuman that way. Okay.

So uh walk me through the actual instantiation of the product. I understand Grammarly is you know like a widget. Yeah, let's maybe talk about superhuman go the new product because that's what I have no context on. Yes, please. Right. Right. Yeah.

And actually we teased it we teased that a little bit last time I was here too and the the core idea is a a simple reframe of Grammarly. Uh so superhuman go uh takes the core underlying technology layer of Grammarly and opens it up as a platform.

So most people think about Grammarly as a grammar assistant and that that is a big piece of what it does but underneath it is a layer that allows you to bring AI to a proactive embedded experience in every tool you use. Grammarly works in about a million different web apps, desktop apps and mobile applications.

Uh and now you can run any agent not just your writing assistant on top of that platform embedded connected and personal. How do you think about the the wars at the various layers of the stack? There's a war. They're fighting all of them. I mean, there's an AI assistant in basically every web app now.

Like, if I go into Gmail, it's ask me to use Gemini. And then at the browser layer, there's Atlas versus, you know, the what Perplexes got built on. And then there's also the the the OS layer. So, I was reflecting the other day on on Gmail was trying to get me to use Gemini.

Uh Chad was asking me was was asking me to use Atlas and then Apple was trying to get me to use Apple intelligence and it's three helpful AI assistants all in just you want to summarize this email. Yeah. So you said the key word that you said ask. Yeah.

Uh so actually interestingly my frame for if you took all those AI providers and you put them into buckets. Yeah. I call it the assist players, the chat players and the do players. So the chat players that's that's what you're referring to. There's a chatbot everywhere.

Chat GPT is obviously synonymous with that category and there's now dozens of them. Uh those all ask you to go chat with a virtual human assistant. There's a set of folks working on what we call do which is I want an AI agent that can go do things on my behalf as headless tasks.

Y and you know I think the most popular one right now or the one people are talking a lot about is all the ones in the coding space. You know the anthropic team said 39% of their queries are for headless agentic tests and being used for developers writing code.

But at the bottom of that stack is another category we call assist. And that's the category where we bring AI to you. So I'll give you I'll give you one fun stat. We do about a 100red billion LLM calls a week. It would make us a top AI provider bas based on uh um uh any anybody's volume.

But we do that across about 40 million users, which if you do the quick math on that, that's about uh that's a few thousand AI calls a day per person. So, if you're a really really good Gemini user or you're a really good Tach user, maybe use it a dozen times. Yep. We do it. Yeah.

Every time you press a key, every time you load a new doc, load a new app, we proactively bring AI to you and we're figuring out all the places we can invisibly insert AI uh so it can assist you right where you're working. Yeah, that makes sense.

Uh will you any any plans to get into the browser game or are you going to let people duke it out there? Yeah, that's not our plan. And I mean, I think I think we work our strength is that we work everywhere. By the way, I should say I'm so excited that there is a browser game.

I remember when I was at I was at Microsoft when Chrome came out and I worked at Google for a long time and I watched I watched that happen and then it just felt like it went away for a long time. So, it's pretty exciting actually that there's some competition in browsers. But we work wherever you work.

We work in browsers, we work in the desktop, we work on your mobile phones. Um, to be honest, some fragmentation in the browser world is probably good for us. I mean, it makes it even more valuable to have an assistant that follows you everywhere, and that's the core of the technology we built anyways.

But, uh, you know, I I I don't see us in that game, but I I'm I'm very curious to watch it. Fantastic. Makes a lot of sense. Uh, well, congratulations on the, uh, all the progress. You dressing up for Halloween later? I Well, I am I am dressed up. I'm the superhuman CEO. Yeah, there we go. Nailed it.

[laughter] It's fantastic. That's the most locked in costume. That is incredibly locked in costume. I love He's super superman himself, I'd say. Yeah. Uh, thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations. Great to get the update. Love the new name. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.

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