Confronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me

Summary

Today, I’m talking with Shishir Mehrotra, who is CEO of Superhuman — that’s the company formerly known as Grammarly, which is still its flagship product.  Shishir also used to be the chief product officer at YouTube, and he’s on the board of directors at Spotify. He’s a fascinating guy, and we actually scheduled this interview a month or so ago, thinking we’d talk about AI and what it’s doing to software, platforms, and creativity pretty broadly. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. Then things really took a turn. Back in August of last year, Grammarly shipped a feature called Expert Review, which allowed you to get writing suggestions from AI-cloned “experts,” and reporters at The Verge and other outlets discovered that those experts included us. It included me. No one had ever asked permission to use our names this way, and a lot of reporters were outraged by this — the talented investigative journalist Julia Angwin was so upset she filed a class action lawsuit about it. Superhuman responded to this by first offering up an email-based opt out and then killing the feature entirely. Shishir apologized, and you’ll hear him apologize again.  Throughout all of this, I kept wondering if Shishir was still going to show up and record Decoder, because my questions about decision-making and AI and platforms suddenly seemed a lot harder than before. To his credit, he did, and he stuck it out. This conversation got tense at times, and it’s clear we disagree about how extractive AI feels for people. But I won’t stretch this out any longer. Okay: Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.  Shishir Mehrotra, you’re the CEO of Superhuman. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks for having me. I’m happy you’re here. I’m a little surprised you’re here. I think you know what some of the questions are going to be, but I’m really happy you made it. I have a lot of questions about AI, how people feel about AI, and then a feature you launched in Grammarly, which is one of your products, that made people feel a lot of feelings about AI. So we’re going to get into it. Let’s start at the start. Superhuman owns Grammarly and Coda. You own a bunch of companies. Just quickly describe the structure of Superhuman and all your products. Superhuman is the AI native productivity suite. We bring AI to wherever people work. Late last year, we changed the name of our corporate entity from Grammarly to Superhuman. We did that because the scope of what we do has broadened quite a bit. And so in addition to Grammarly, which is everyone’s favorite writing assistant, we now have a document space called Coda, and a very popular email client called Mail. We launched a new product called Superhuman Go. Go is the platform that brings you a network of proactive and personal AI assistance directly to wherever you work. So for people familiar with Grammarly, you can think about Go as taking that core idea and allowing anybody to write agents that work just like Grammarly does. Your sales agent, your support agent, so on, can all help work with you right where you work. The core idea is that most AI tools require a big change in behavior. We bring AI where you work. Across our products, we see about a million different apps and agents every day. We seamlessly blend AI right into your experience, so you don’t have to think about AI. That’s what we’ve been doing with Grammarly for years. And now we are opening that up so anyone can build on that with Superhuman Go. You and I hung out a few weeks ago, and one of the things we talked about was the fact that Grammarly, for most people, is expressed as a keyboard. It shows up on your phone and your documents. You spend a lot of time figuring out how to make sure you work with things like Google Docs.  All of those products are integrating AI in exactly the same way as you’re describing. I think you put AI right next to the insertion point, right next to your cursor. What’s the big differentiation for you? First off, I think very few of them actually are doing that particularly well. A handful do. But as I mentioned, we see a million unique apps a day. The way to think about Grammarly is it’s your assistant that lives everywhere. You might be in a web app. It could be Gmail, it could be Google Docs, it could be Coda, it could be Notion.  You could be in a desktop app. That could be Apple Notes, that could be Slack, that could be whatever app you’re using. It could be every mobile application. We have, for every one of those applications, figured out the right way to observe what you’re doing, annotate it in a way that is unobtrusive to you and to the application, and to make changes on your behalf. And doing that everywhere is the proposition. As you jump from tool to tool, there are different types of AI in each one. Most of them