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CEOs need to rip the Band-Aid off when it comes to how artificial intelligence will change their workforces, according to one AI leader.
“Very few CEOs in the C-suite have been brave enough to call it — have been brave enough to reach into HR [departments] and say I’m ringing the fire alarm,” Writer co-founder May Habib said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast (see video above or listen below). “We need to rebuild this organization [because of AI]. We need different people in charge. No one’s doing that.”
Habib added that bravery in the C-suite doesn’t mean mass layoffs.
“I actually think that is lazy, not brave,” she said. “You need leaders who can look people in the eye and say, look, this will most likely be a smaller company, but not by a lot. But I need a company here with all of you that has 10x the footprint of the footprint we got today, and we’re going to do it with AI. And if you can do it with AI, you get to stay. If you can’t do it with AI, I don’t know that there’s a place for you.”
Habib is a Lebanese-born entrepreneur and linguist who has become a prominent leader in the enterprise AI space.
After graduating from Harvard with a degree in economics and Near Eastern languages, she began her career as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and as a vice president at the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala.
In 2015, she co-founded Qordoba, a content management and localization platform. In 2020, she pivoted and rebranded Qordoba to debut Writer.
Under her leadership, Writer has distinguished itself by building its own full-stack large language models (LLMs) that prioritize data privacy and cost-efficiency. It has trained its Palmyra models for a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley rivals.
As of early 2026, Writer has raised a total of $369 million, achieving a unicorn valuation of $1.9 billion. The company’s most significant funding came in a $200 million Series C round closed in November 2024.
The advance of Writer’s AI tools — and those by competitors — coincide with the remaking of corporate America because of the fast-moving technology. For some humans in the tech industry, it has been particularly painful.
Recent tech layoffs have been eye-popping, including massive job cuts at Block (XYZ), Amazon (AMZN), and Oracle (ORCL) this year, with more expected from Meta (META).
