Why AI Content Needs a Guardian: Introducing Markup AI

(I realize I’ve been relatively quiet since I started my new job in January…this is what I’ve been up to. It may be the most interesting job I’ve ever had…but more to come on that over time.)

I was at a recent Gartner CEO conference on AI in New York City, and one phrase keeps rattling around in my brain: “There is such a rapid pace of development that we are regularly seeing ‘obsolescence before maturity.'” In other words, by the time AI products reach early adoption in the market, they’re already obsolete.

But here’s the thing – while everyone’s racing to build the next AI breakthrough, they’re missing a massive problem hiding in plain sight. AI has fundamentally changed the content game. You can generate content faster than ever, but the risk has grown exponentially. Human review doesn’t scale at AI speeds. Companies need intelligent guardrails.

That’s why I’m excited to announce what we’ve been building at Markup AI.

The Problem No One’s Talking About

Let’s be honest about what AI does well and what it doesn’t. AI models are fantastic at content generation by the pound, but they’re not great at precision and quality. More importantly, AI can’t possibly check its own work for quality. As you know from using ChatGPT or Claude, when you push back on AI output, it responds “you’re absolutely right,” no matter what you say. That’s not exactly the kind of rigorous quality control you want for your enterprise content.

The writing assistant industry has been playing “small ball” for years – spell check, grammar, basic tone suggestions, looking at one sentence at a time as you’re writing content. They’ve ignored several elephants in the room: brand compliance, terminology management, risk management, and batch checking already-published content.

Enterprise content production and compliance is a massively fragmented problem. Companies have thousands of people who write publicly facing content and dozens of systems for authoring, storing, and publishing content on one hand; and multiple brand and policy rule books and thousands to hundreds of thousands of pieces of already-published content on the other.

We work with the world’s largest enterprises across technology, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing – organizations that can’t afford content mistakes because the stakes are too high. One wrong sentence could mean litigation, regulatory issues, or a reputation crisis.

Markup AI: Your AI Watching Your AI

This is why we’re launching Markup AI – the first content guardian agent. Think of it as your AI watching your AI. We scan, score, and rewrite content to ensure it’s on-brand, compliant, and won’t create problems.

Fixing typos is great, but that won’t ensure your content doesn’t get you sued, fired, or create a reputation crisis. We’re making sure your content actually serves its purpose.

The name says it all: Editors markup documents. Lawyers markup documents. Writers markup their own documents. And developers regularly use markup languages and annotations. Markup AI will quickly become the standard for Content Guardian Agents in the AI space – helping companies to scan, score, and rewrite content that is consistent, authentic, and compliant, rapidly and at scale.

The Press Release announcing our launch and $27mm financing is here.

What Makes Us Different

Here’s what makes us different: we meet you where you already work. Through our API-first approach, Markup AI integrates into whatever content systems and workflows you’re using today. No rip-and-replace required.

We’re building the future of content creation – where speed doesn’t compromise safety. True AI-native solutions that tackle trust and risk head-on in an AI-first world with triggers for human-in-the-loop. Because at the end of the day, AI can write, but someone needs to ensure what it writes is actually right.

This is a Restart

This isn’t just a product launch – it’s a restart. A new AI-native platform, a new team, a new location, and a new brand. With years of linguistic engineering experience behind us in our prior business Acrolinx, the gold standard for enterprise content compliance, we’re excited to unveil our new native-AI brand and platform, Markup AI.

We’ve been at this for a while now, and we’re proud to announce that leading tech companies such as Amazon, Adobe, ServiceNow, Gainsight, Instacart, Coinbase, plus over 75 more AI-first companies have all asked for early access to our Content Guardian Agent and a number are already up and running.

The future of content is here – and it needs intelligent guardrails. We’re excited to show you what we’ve built and how Markup AI can help your organization navigate the AI content revolution safely and successfully.

Ready to see your AI watching your AI? Visit us at www.markup.ai to learn more, get an API key for free, and try out our Writer’s Playground or the API itself.

More to come on the restart journey. It’s an interesting one, full of lessons for Startup CEOs everywhere.