SAN FRANCISCO (TIP): Yet another Indian American executive is set to lead a major US company. Rahul Roy-Chowdhury will take over as CEO of Grammarly, a cloud-based typing assistant that helps users with their writing, including reviewing spelling, grammar, punctuation and plagiarism reviews, from May 1.
The elevation of Roy-Chowdhury, current global head of product at the San Francisco headquartered company, was announced by the current CEO Brad Hoover in a Grammarly blogpost Tuesday, March 21.
“We’re now at an inflection point for our product and business. Seizing this moment and reaching the next orders of magnitude requires us to move faster and at a much larger scale,” he wrote.
“A new era of leadership can help drive this inflection. As such, after twelve years at the helm of Grammarly, I am passing the baton to our current Global Head of Product, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury,” Hoover wrote.
“Now is the ideal time for this transition. Grammarly is a deeply technical, product-led company,” Hoover wrote. “Rahul’s product and technology background is a tremendous asset, and he is well-positioned to help us navigate the path ahead.” “Rahul is also mission-driven and fiercely user-focused, and his experience and learnings from building Chrome into a platform can help us move faster at scale,” he wrote. “During his two years at Grammarly, Rahul has focused on driving excellence and helped us up-level as a company. He has pushed our thinking and driven the organization forward with clarity, keen judgment, and sound decision-making.
“Under Rahul’s leadership, we also took a big step forward with our product, increasing quality and introducing solutions to help beyond the revision stage of communication,” Hoover wrote.
Prior to Grammarly, Roy-Chowdhury was vice president for product management at Google where he had worked for 14 years. He has an MBA degree from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and also an MS in computer science from Columbia University. Grammarly is also introducing a brand-new artificial intelligence tool, the latest venture into the quickly expanding field of technology that can produce text, photographs, and videos from scratch in Silicon Valley. “The enthusiasm around AI is so palpable,” Roy-Chowdhury remarked. “We are witnessing a groundswell of support for this issue of communication.”
GrammarlyGO, an upcoming offering from the startup, is scheduled for release in April. According to Roy-Chowhury, who led the team that developed the product, it will assess context to construct and recommend phrasing for various circumstances based on a text’s level of formality and tone.
Grammarly has generally concentrated on the writing stage of the composition process. However, GrammarlyGO will provide input on the questions to ask and the information that could be helpful to include.
In a competitive market with many players, Roy-Chowdhury praised the company’s years of experience in ethical AI development, including work to eliminate bias in the underlying data.
“Our mission of improving lives by improving communication is a long-term aspiration—we’ve still barely scratched the surface of what’s possible!” Hoover wrote.
“Our core technology of artificial intelligence is accelerating in exciting and unprecedented ways, especially with the broader application of large language models coupled with continuously increasing computing power,” he wrote. “The market is appreciating the ability of AI to augment human agency and genuinely help people. While broader AI innovation and adoption may be a disruptor for some, it will be a great accelerator for Grammarly,” Hoover added.