Joseph Wildey
“Draftsmith AI combines user focus with generative AI’s potential to eliminate writer’s block and make quick work of rote editing tasks.”
Joseph is a marketing leader and MBA candidate who is passionate about creating alignment between strategy and actions across diverse teams.
Originally published on LinkedIn
Review: Draftsmith Proffers a "People-Driven" Future with AI
Since ChatGPT 3.5 launched just over a year ago, many professional writers and editors have experienced emotions ranging from awe to fear. Unable to ignore the technology’s incredible potential, people whose currency is words have pivoted, often out of necessity.
Most writers and editors agree that AI tools available today still lack the context that only a human editor can provide. That said, many have begun incorporating these tools into their workflows. Others have outright resisted and fought back.
Simultaneously, most AI tools in development or use propose to augment (but not entirely replace) the work of writing and editing. Tools like Microsoft Copilot are positioned as an "everyday AI companion" and aimed squarely at users who want a general-purpose, AI-powered tool to help with emails or decks.
In Copilot’s case, Microsoft's sizeable user base means its users will hail from diverse business backgrounds, writing levels, and experiences. Creating a tool that meets the needs of every user in such a diverse market is nearly impossible, so Copilot and its compatriots by necessity sacrifice some customizability and niche features to attract and satisfy the largest possible user group.
For every product market void, there exists an opportunity for companies to target it by focusing on a narrow segment of users whose needs are not entirely being met by current offerings. One such segment in the writing and editing world is skilled editors who don’t want or need AI to replace what they do—they just want some help.
Enter Draftsmith, a new Microsoft Word add-in from Intelligent Editing, which also developed PerfectIt for writing and editing professionals. Draftsmith combines elements of PerfectIt’s user focus with generative AI’s potential to eliminate writer’s block and make quick work of rote editing tasks.
Current PerfectIt users will feel immediately at home in Draftsmith’s ribbon, which smartly organizes its core capabilities based on where the user is in the drafting process. The categories, which include pre-edit, revise, simplify, and review intuitively guide users through various stages of the writing and editing process.
Draftsmith's ribbon is simple and emphasizes the power of customization available to its users.
Like PerfectIt, most of Draftsmith’s core constituency will find the greatest utility in the software’s customization options. After a minimal amount of time spent learning the interface, I quickly toggled the sidebar’s three “modes,” which are each modifiable. Clicking a mode allows one to select any of Draftsmith’s checks from categories that include audience, style, line edit, source, and funny.
Because each mode is modifiable, it is easy to imagine several potential use cases that would help an editor looking to maximize her time spent on a document.
Working on a proposal written by a subject matter expert who you know writes in too casual a tone, favors long sentences, and abuses passive voice? You can have Draftsmith check for each of these three issues in sequence as you work your way through a text, creating a uniquely customized experience for the editor looking to improve her efficiency and output.
Draftsmith’s “Passive to Active” function impressed me with its ability to recast sentences. In only rare instances did I disagree with the sentence-level edit it produced, though I feel like this function should come embedded with some type of reminder to “mix and match.” This would help Draftsmith's users avoid creating a piece comprising mostly active voice that feels disjointed and irritates readers with its self-infatuated tone.
“Draftsmith’s entrance into the AI space comes at an opportune time given the obsessive focus on AI in both the media and capital markets.”
Draftsmith would, if I approved each edit shown to me while using the active voice function, turn my writing into a series of “I this” and “I that” statements, making obvious the need for someone, like the human user of Draftsmith in this case, to consider the context for each edit.
While a similar function is native to Word and offered by Grammarly, it was nice to see a fully fleshed-out sentence created in real-time in a sidebar rather than little squiggly lines or underlines and popouts.
Draftsmith exhibited some behaviors that struck me as buggy, or maybe purposely designed to convince me of my continued utility as a sack of meat tasked with editing a manuscript. Some edits were just off, as in not something a well-trained human would suggest. Take, for instance, its suggestion that I change “My career path within my current company has spanned more than a decade” to “I have spanned more than a decade in my current company.”
While the former calls to mind a well-tenured professional (my aim in writing that first sentence), the latter invokes images of my mind and body transcending space and time (stuck in a tesseract, perhaps?).
Draftsmith’s “Reduce Word Count” function should appeal to bid professionals looking to maximize every inch of real estate in their bid documents, a common concern of those faced with page limitations. The team behind Draftsmith has, through their programming alchemy, created an AI version of Ozempic that can curb any writer’s appetite for verbosity. This function will prove valuable for those whose job has been to pore over text to trim fat manually or, more recently, copy/paste offensively long sentences into ChatGPT or similar tools to get them down to an acceptable length.
Apart from Draftsmith’s core competencies, its “funny” functionality has several options sure to delight—and maybe even distract—its users. Its “Talk Like a Pirate Day” setting embeds humor into the software, calling to mind how Tesla’s software engineers often include Easter eggs that allow drivers to entertain passengers on a whim.
In the unlikely event you do find yourself needing to talk like a pirate, prepare yourself for frequent “Arrrr!” beginnings to sentences, which if I am being entirely honest diminishes the humor of the function over time through its reliance on this repetition. (Maybe a Talk Like a Canadian Day function next, eh?)
Draftsmith’s “Shakespeare Day” function, however, should find an audience with anyone who has ever wanted to subvert the annual review process by employing impenetrable prose—the self-evaluative review writing equivalent of paying for a parking fine in pennies.
If I had a voice on the Intelligent Editing team tasked with developing these functions, I’d argue for a Corporate Jargon function next that transforms any text into an MBA student's dream.
“Overall, Draftsmith exhibited the same human-focused user experience and technology underpinning Intelligent Editing’s PerfectIt.”
While the utility of these funny functions is more limited beyond the personal enjoyment of the Draftsmith user employing them, their inclusion offers an interesting window into the creative processes and penchants of the team that developed Draftsmith, adding a quirkiness and personality that is maybe missing from other AI-powered writing tools on the market today.
On the topic of ChatGPT, you may be wondering where Draftsmith fits in now given that tool’s near ubiquity as a sidekick for most knowledge workers. Draftsmith makes several claims that seek to separate it from its AI brethren. According to Draftsmith’s website, the user’s “text is never used to train AI models.” It also uses Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, which includes enterprise-grade security. In plain English, your data remains your data.
To make the process even clearer, the website outlines via a detailed illustration how information is uploaded and returned to a document to produce Draftsmith's recommendations. All this should assuage the concerns of most users’ IT departments and legal teams.
While Draftsmith's accompanying marketing material likely provides more security information than most casual users of the software will care or need to see, the focus of Draftsmith’s developers on this area does add a layer of comfort for users whose text contains proprietary or highly confidential information—think medical professionals or people working on drug approvals for the pharmaceutical industry.
My use of Draftsmith revealed a light-touch, "people-driven" approach to AI largely ignored in the media’s hype cycle. To draw a comparison to the automotive world again, Draftsmith imagines a future where human users still sit in the driver’s seat, aided by technology. In contrast, other companies and tools in the same space are perhaps moving toward a less involved role for the human driver, akin to creating an entirely automated vehicle.
Generative AI is still new (and new to many), which means its use comes with some caveats. To that end, my first experience using an early version of Draftsmith was not without a few hiccups.
In several cases, the software prompted me to make changes manually. In other cases, it cautioned that its edits, were I to proceed, may alter the document's formatting. In a few other cases, the connection appeared to be broken as I ran various tests on the text, which I’m willing to attribute to my network connection.
The oddest issue, however, was the first one I experienced upon opening the file I was working on. Call it a glitch or a hallucination, but Draftsmith insisted I had misspelled “assessment” and wanted me to change it to “assesment.” (No dictionary agrees with that conclusion.)
Even stranger was the subsequent change it made to the title containing that word, which resulted in what looked like a bad copy/paste job: “.Answer: ‘Self-Assessm.” This left me puzzled and somewhat amused (given that it was the first sentence it looked at in my test file).
When I shared the issues I experienced with the team at Intelligent Editing, I was assured that they were looking into it and that a fix was in the works. They also noted the need to balance the ever-illusive goal of software “perfection” with the desire to get a tool like Draftsmith into the hands of users who can derive maximum benefit from its use as quickly as possible.
Given the team’s many enhancements to PerfectIt over the years, which I’ve observed firsthand, it’s more than likely initial Draftsmith users will see similar gains in functionality and stability over time.
Overall, Draftsmith exhibited the same people-focused user experience and technology underpinning Intelligent Editing’s PerfectIt. This comes as no surprise from a company dedicated to improving the working lives and experiences of trained professionals, many of whom have spent decades mastering their craft.
Draftsmith’s entrance into the AI space comes at an opportune time given the intense focus on AI in both the media and capital markets. It is a bold move likely to engender continued confidence that the brains behind PerfectIt have not thrown in the towel on human-centered writing just yet. And they’re willing to go to bat for an alternative vision of our future.
What remains to be seen is how Draftsmith’s users react, given how strongly divided some writers and editors are when it comes to AI’s role and utility in their work, especially as many seek to protect their craft. What’s clear is that Draftsmith will have some role to play in the future taking shape right now, which points to AI being here to stay.
Arrrr, it be hard to look at it any other way, matey.
Author's Note: This review reflects my individual experience using an early-release version of Draftsmith provided to me by the team at Intelligent Editing. In exchange for my review, I have received one year of access to Draftsmith.