Maddy Osman, Author & Founder at The Blogsmith

 

I’ve used Grammarly for almost as long as I’ve written content professionally. And I’ve used Grammarly Business ever since I scaled my solo freelance writing business to a content operation with over 40 contributors. My agency, The Blogsmith, offers holistic content marketing for B2B technology brands, with a focus on reader experience. Our clients include Adobe, HubSpot, and GoDaddy. 

All the writers and editors on my team have Grammarly Business subscriptions that enable high-quality communication. Even better, our centralized company account grants all connected users access to our custom style guide—complete with custom grammar rules that align with The Blogsmith Style Guide. 

In July 2022, I published the bestseller Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style in an effort to provide guidance around writing for the modern web. Now, in 2023, the proliferation of generative AI affects writing in ways that are impossible to ignore. These are my takeaways from the Grammarly Keynote in June, which will inform how The Blogsmith uses Grammarly’s latest enterprise AI features to continuously improve our processes.

Generative AI will empower, not replace, my team

As a content agency, our goal is to keep our authors at the helm of projects to ensure our content sounds human and resonates with an intended audience. While generative AI may feel like a threat to that goal, Grammarly’s demo of GrammarlyGO’s latest features quickly checked my assumptions. 

For example, GrammarlyGO can generate summaries of emails so that team members can take action quickly. We can also use this feature to draft a response to an email. Instead of replacing human intuition, generative AI is empowering and accelerating it. Check out the GIF below, which shows this capability in action.

At The Blogsmith, here’s how we’ll take advantage of this feature:

• We’ll process detailed briefs from clients at a glance. This will be especially useful for our project manager, who handles assignments. While she understands the content marketing world enough to be dangerous, it isn’t her core competency. So a summary of incoming project details will help her do her job more efficiently.
• We’ll craft a first draft. I often get in my head about perfecting email communications, which can get in the way of responding promptly. The ability to respond to emails without wasting time obsessing over how to word a reply will help us streamline our internal and external email communications.

In short, GrammarlyGO can help us save a lot of time and mental energy without sacrificing effective communications. Since most of my team has Grammarly Business access, it’s nice to know they can seamlessly use GrammarlyGO across Google Workspace (especially Google Docs and Gmail).

Grammarly’s AI will up-level my team’s unique value

During the keynote, the Grammarly team also demonstrated how it would incorporate the brand tones feature of Grammarly Business into GrammarlyGO to make the outputs more aligned with a company’s voice. Check out the GIF below to see this feature in action.

Currently, my team uses brand tones to measure how we’re meeting writing goals—such as how often we present a confident tone in our writing over the past 30 days. Grammarly Business presents tone suggestions to help us stay on track. Ultimately, confident tones mean stronger writing:

• More writers and editors use the active voice.
• More writers and editors use concise language to get their points across—resulting in less padding with adjectives and qualifiers and an increased use of concrete terms.
• More writers and editors write with differing rhythms in every paragraph, so content no longer sounds monotone.

I was intrigued to see how GrammarlyGO would incorporate brand tones. Essentially, you designate your brand-tone profile, and GrammarlyGO will help you rewrite text to be on-brand and aligned with your company voice.

The more we can do to define the brand in terms of AI-detected tone of voice (combined with human editing), the easier it will be for the team to write with consistently high standards that elevate our client’s communications across every medium, including blogs, social media copy, and website pages.

Knowledge Share will create team-wide understanding for improved outputs

I’m most excited about Grammarly’s announcement of Knowledge Share. This feature takes Grammarly’s mission to improve communication to the next level by improving the comprehension of a message. Knowledge Share works by surfacing relevant internal company information for a team member as they compose a message—such as the client style guide, quick tips about writing for the client, and any personal details the writer and editor need to represent the brand effectively. Check out Grammarly’s demonstration of this feature in the clip below.

I also love the ability to connect various reference documents (we live in Google Workspace), further enabling the team to dig into relevant concepts and terms. I’m always looking for ways to empower my team to answer their own questions, and this is a great way to up-level our current approach. If team members have to wait for others to connect them to the documents they need to finish a task, our process gets interrupted, which hurts our ability to meet client deadlines.

Final thoughts

Since one-third of Fortune 500 companies use Grammarly Business, The Blogsmith is in great company. It’s exciting to see how any company implements AI to complement existing offerings, especially a tool that’s already integral to our operations. I’m thrilled about Grammarly’s direction, and The Blogsmith is looking forward to putting these tools to use.