How Qualcomm increases employee productivity and satisfaction with Writer

Qualcomm, a leader in enabling intelligent processing, has also been pioneering AI research and development for over a decade. The company sees generative AI as not only ‌a valuable technology for consumers, but also a valuable technology for its employees. Qualcomm Incorporated SVP & CMO Don McGuire and his team were looking for a generative AI solution that could help those in the marketing team and across the company accelerate time to market, increase productivity, and foster creativity. They selected Writer and have successfully rolled it out to hundreds of users across marketing, comms, legal, product, analytics, sales, L&D, and HR.

The search for the right AI vendor

In late 2021, Senior Manager of Marketing Brent Summers (Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.) saw the opportunity for generative AI to streamline his work, and he had a few vendor requirements in mind. “We needed an AI vendor that wasn’t just an application wrapper, but really a full-stack platform. We wanted a vendor with LLMs that they would stand behind, a RAG solution that could incorporate our own corporate data, and ability to support the surfaces where we work like Word, Outlook, and Figma,” says Summers. “We were really pleased to find all of that with Writer.”

It was also important to Summers that the vendor they selected was led by experienced founders who could be trusted to navigate the fast-paced and crowded AI landscape. “Writer’s impressive co-founders are experienced and technical. CEO May Habib and CTO Waseem AlShikh have been great collaborators with our executive team, helping us make the most out of our Writer implementation,” says Summers.

For Qualcomm, responsible AI was top of mind and solutions brought onboard needed to be transparent, secure, safe, and fair. The company’s AI Council provides strategic guidance on the use and development of AI, including policies and procedures to vet and deploy AI tools. “When we vetted Writer through our AI Council, we found many strengths to the platform. Writer is enterprise-ready, takes privacy and security seriously, and can protect our IP. Plus the platform is customizable enough to support our breadth of use cases and it integrates with the tools we already use, making it incredibly easy for our people to adopt,” says McGuire.

Accelerating workflows across functions with AI

When Summers conducted an initial pilot with Writer, 100% of users wanted to adopt the platform on a full-time basis, which gave him confidence to scale the solution. The marketing and comms team soon began integrating Writer into many of its most critical workflows, using it for product launches, campaign assets, media sentiment analysis, audience-based messaging, event recaps, and more. “Writer has provided us with instant benefit from day one,” says VP of Marketing Carmen True (Qualcomm Technologies). “We use it across all the different disciplines and it powers the whole collective suite of assets and deliverables that we create.”

As a global company, Qualcomm employees speak many different languages. Writer’s Palmyra LLMs support highly-accurate text generation and translation in over 30 languages, including Spanish, French, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, and Russian. “Writer is able to help with language translation and transcreation, which is both helpful here in San Diego with people that may not speak English as a first language, but also in our regions, as we look to transcreate content or develop new content in native languages,” said McGuire.

The Writer success team quickly onboarded new users with cohort-based training, office hours, and use case development workshops. Within months, there were over 100 active users on the platform and news quickly spread to other functions. “Writer helped us be wildly successful. So much so, that other teams had fear of missing out and asked to get access as well,” said Summers. Writer usage at Qualcomm now spans across teams in legal, product, analytics, sales, L&D, HR, and internal communications. Across the organization, they have vetted over 25 unique use cases and defined 70 different workflows that Writer powers. Here are a few examples:

AI for ROI and employee happiness

Since deploying Writer, the Qualcomm team has seen impressive adoption and impact. About 85% of users use Writer on a weekly basis and 60% use Writer multiple times a week. Across all users, Qualcomm is saving about 2,400 hours per month. Summers credits the success of Qualcomm’s implementation with their approach to onboarding. With top-down executive support from marketing, IT, and legal for the platform, the team had the necessary air cover to really go deep in defining the use cases. “Writer also has an extensive customer success team, who have supported us in reskilling and upskilling our people,” says Summers.

Beyond the time savings, McGuire also values the freedom and happiness that Writer brings to its users. “Our Writer users not only sing its praises for the productivity gains but also that it frees up their time to do other things, like enhance their careers or focus on more strategic decision making,” says McGuire. “Writer has helped create happier employees here at Qualcomm. Happier employees are more productive, more creative, and more satisfied with their job. Anything that can actually create a happier employee is a priority for me.”

The team is excited to do even more with Writer in the near future. Next up on the roadmap is connecting Sharepoint to Writer Knowledge Graph so teams can incorporate their corporate data into their Writer workflow. They are also looking forward to adopting Writer AI Studio, which would allow business users to create more customized AI apps for their needs.

“We’re very proud of our relationship with Writer,” says True. “Writer is extremely customer-focused, which is demonstrated by the high usage we have across our organization. It shows the best of generative AI and I can’t wait to see what we do next.”

Snapdragon is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.