Discover/Village Global Podcast/[Highlight] Grammarly's Evolution into a...

The idea is to open up the platform to anybody. Grammarly starts to feel a little bit closer to what we built at YouTube. It's an open platform where a big piece of what we do is get distribution for your agents.

Village Global Podcast · [Highlight] Grammarly's Evolution into an AI Agent Platform...

“Another one is your virtual EA and says, you said you can meet Tuesday at 7PM, but you actually can't do that.”

6:16 / 6:56

Another one is your virtual EA and says, you said you can meet Tuesday at 7PM, but you actually can't do that. You have your daughter's reception at that time.

Are these agents that Grammarly is building for customers, or you're saying customers are are building on top of your platform? So the the idea is to open up the platform

to anybody. And, you know, from that perspective, Grammarly starts to feel and part of the reason they wanted to talk to me about it was I'll talk about the code piece in a minute, but it starts to feel a little bit closer to what we built at YouTube. It's an open platform where a big piece of what we do is get distribution for your agents. And if you think about most companies, they build they they build or buy onto AI software that, you know, is very hard to get people to use.

Why this clip

Explains the strategic shift to platform model with a compelling analogy to YouTube's success. The distribution angle reveals the key value proposition for developers and positions Grammarly as infrastructure rather than just an app, showing clear business model evolution.

6:16 - 6:5639sBusiness Mechanics

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What they said next

Luis, the CEO of Duolingo said 'that's really cool, probably doesn't apply to us. We build apps. Somebody else will build agents.' And I said, 'no, no, no, I think it actually applies to you as well.' And we ended up brainstorming for the next hour.

8:56 - 24s · Origin Story

More from this episode

Village Global Podcast

Bold/Contrarian

Grammarly built the first agent, the original agent. What Grammarly does is it works in about 500,000 or so different applications. Every web app, desktop app, mobile app that you use, everything from Slack to Gmail to Salesforce, Grammarly can read your screen, annotate it in a way that is unobtrusive to anything else you're doing, and it can make changes on your behalf anywhere.

Bold claim that Grammarly was 'the first agent' reframes a familiar grammar tool as a pioneering AI platform. The massive scale (500k applications) and technical capabilities described challenge how people think about what Grammarly actually is versus what they thought it was.

4:20 - 4:5233s

Village Global Podcast

Practical Framework

The horizontal AI players roughly break into three buckets: assist, chat, and do. If you use ChatGPT a dozen times in a day, you'd be a pretty heavy user. There's another bucket I call 'Do' - those are all the people building agents and AI that goes off and does things in a headless way.

Clear categorization framework for understanding the AI landscape with specific, memorable labels. The ChatGPT usage benchmark provides concrete context, and the 'Do' category introduces a less familiar but important concept that helps people understand where different AI tools fit.

7:14 - 7:4935s

Village Global Podcast

Bold/Contrarian

The actual thing that Grammarly has built is a technical architecture for bringing AI right to where people work. We didn't call it AI when that happened, but Grammarly built the first agent, the original agent.

Reframes Grammarly's entire value proposition from grammar checker to AI infrastructure pioneer. The revelation that they were building AI before calling it AI adds credibility to the bold claim, challenging conventional understanding of the company's positioning.

4:00 - 4:3434s

Village Global Podcast

Origin Story

Luis, the CEO of Duolingo said 'that's really cool, probably doesn't apply to us. We build apps. Somebody else will build agents.' And I said, 'no, no, no, I think it actually applies to you as well.' And we ended up brainstorming for the next hour.

Concrete story showing how even sophisticated tech CEOs initially misunderstand the agent opportunity. The dialogue format makes it engaging, and the pivot from skepticism to hour-long brainstorming session demonstrates the 'aha moment' that many companies will have.

8:56 - 9:2024s

Village Global Podcast

Consequences

Probably not the agent you started with - how do I get the high school grammar teacher to go do something. It turns out to be really, really valuable, especially when your grammar teacher can sit right next to you and help make sure you spell your company's name properly.

Relatable metaphor of the grammar teacher 'sitting right next to you' makes the AI assistant concept tangible. Shows the unexpected value discovery - what seemed like a simple grammar tool became something much more valuable when repositioned as an always-present assistant.

5:23 - 5:5128s

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