This CEO thinks software devs will be ‘just fine’ amid AI worries

Yahoo Finance Video and Brian Sozzi

Wed, February 11, 2026 at 12:22 AM GMT+9

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The tech sector stabilizes this week after AI concerns sent software stocks into a tailspin last week, with many developers worrying that artificial intelligence could replace software tools and human programmers altogether.

Superhuman (formerly Grammarly) CEO Shishir Mehrotra speaks with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi about how the software space is adapting to AI integration, Superhuman’s own AI assistant programs, and how the company sees its suite of AI tools aiding and enhancing the work of human workers.

Mehrotra was one of the original co-founders of Superhuman in 2014 before its eventual acquisition by Grammarly in 2025.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Opening Bid.

Video Transcript

00:00 Speaker A

What should an investor be looking for in some of these software companies? How do they know if they’re durable?

00:04 Speaker B

You know, I think, uh, I mean I’ve watched these cycles as mobile, as cloud, and so on. You know, I think I think you want to see which companies are adapting to it. So, so I think it’s important that the the companies that stick their heads in the sand are going to be are going to be sunk. But I think a lot of the companies that are being punished right now are actually reacting fine and they’re going to be just fine.

00:23 Speaker A

Do you see themselves, you see them reinventing themselves?

00:26 Speaker B

I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

00:27 Speaker A

Talk to us about what you’re working on at Grammarly.

00:29 Speaker B

Yeah, so, um, so Grammarly people are unfamiliar, we’re uh one of the world’s most popular communication assistants. Uh about 40 million daily active users, do over $700 million in revenue. I think it’s one of the world’s best-kept secrets.

00:43 Speaker A

I didn’t even realize it was that big now.

00:44 Speaker B

Yeah, it’s it’s it’s a much bigger business than people think. Uh but actually the thing people most misunderstand about it is they think it’s about grammar. Um, which is a totally reasonable assumption. But actually the thing that Grammarly does is it’s the OG AI assistant. It’s an assistant that works right next to you. We see a million unique um uh surfaces a day. So every desktop app uh web app and mobile app, uh we can observe what you’re doing. We can annotate it in a way that’s unobtrusive to you and make changes on your behalf. Right now we only do that for grammar and the big change is we’re about to do it for everything. So anybody can run agents just like Grammarly on that same platform.

01:21 Speaker A

How will that change the user experience?

01:23 Speaker B

Yeah, so maybe uh a simple example, say I’m writing I’m a salesperson, I’m writing an email to uh a customer. Today, uh Grammarly feels like you have your high school grammar teacher sitting on your shoulder with your red and blue marker, uh marking everything up. Now it’s going to feel like your, you know, you have all these other agents sitting with you too. So it could be your sales coach saying, hey, you’re about to recommend the wrong product. It could be your um support uh uh person saying, hey, this person had an outage yesterday, you should acknowledge that. It could just be your your electronic or your digital assistant saying, you said you’re going to meet tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. but you have your daughter’s recital then. And all of them can help you the same way that we’ve been helping millions of people with grammar. We’re now going to be able to help millions of people with everything else that they do as well.

02:08 Speaker A

As someone that is working on really, I mean, this is amazing technology. I mean, do you fear the next update out of Anthropic?

02:14 Speaker B

I mean we’re huge customers. I mean so customer of Anthropic. Oh yeah, we’re customer of Anthropic, Open AI. We we do over 100 billion LLM calls a week. Um, for I mean if you’re just judge us as a an AI property, we’re probably one of the biggest in the world. But we do it in a way that brings it right to the user so you don’t think about it.

02:35 Speaker A

Do you do you worry about them making a product like yours obsolete?

02:39 Speaker B

I don’t think so. I mean what we do is a little bit different in terms of bringing AI directly into people’s surfaces. I think they work a lot on models, they work a lot on uh what we call the chat interfaces. But if you think about the main metaphors in AI, there’s a lot of people focused on chat, you know, we we want to talk to an AI bot. There’s a lot of focused on what we call we call do, which is task automation. We work on something we call assist. So if I like the stat I gave you 100 billion LM calls a week across 40 million people, that means for an average Grammarly user, we do a few thousand AI calls a day. So, you know, if you’re a really good chat user, a really good cloud user, maybe you could do a dozen in a day. But we do it every time you type a character, you open a new doc, you open a new application, we’re calling all the AI systems on your behalf. And I think at that scale and that level of integration, it’s just a very different paradigm for how to think about AI.

03:37 Speaker A

What about superhuman? Now these businesses were combined. Like what’s the next generation of a superhuman?

03:42 Speaker B

Yeah, so we brought together four different products. So the the um original Superhuman product, what we now call Superhuman Mail, uh Grammarly, uh my old product called Coda, and the new product we call Go. Go is the platform layer of Grammarly, the thing that lets anybody build agents that look like Grammarly. Um so we brought all four together and then we decided to change the corporate name and we had lots of ideas for what to do it. We decided to pluck the one out from

04:10 Speaker A

Sounds cool. No offense to Grammarly. I mean Superhuman sounds cool.

04:12 Speaker B

Well, I think that it’s yeah, sounds cool. That’s obviously a starting point. That was it. Sounds cool. Got to sound cool. The uh it’s broad, which I think is really important, so you can cover a lot of things. But actually the thing we love about it is the word human. Uh because if you think about most people working on AI are really worried about uh you know, they’re out there trying to replace humans. We have the opposite viewpoint. Grammarly has always been the product that we work with you, but at the end of the day, you write the article, you submit the blog post, you’re the one who submits the essay. Uh it’s all it’s we’re there to assist you. So I like to say we spent the last 16 years turning people into super writers, and now we can spend the next few decades turning people into super humans.

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