By Beatriz Marie D. Cruz, Reporter

JENNI, Inc. the US-based company that built artificial intelligence (AI)-powered writing assistant Jenni AI, is optimistic about expanding its presence in the Philippines as more universities explore the benefits of using AI tools in the academic setting.

“The Philippines is poised to become one of Jenni AI’s fastest-growing markets over the next 18–24 months for several reasons,” Justin Wong, head of commercial operations at Jenni AI, said in an e-mail. “Although English is considered a second language for most of the population, the Philippines ranks as one of the highest English-proficient countries in the world, which gives academics an advantage since the majority of scientific and research articles are published in English.”

Jenni AI is an AI-powered tool that provides writing and research assistance for both the academic and professional setting.

At present, it is being used by over 4.5 million academics worldwide, including 300,000 researchers, post-graduate students, and faculty based in the Philippines, the company said.

“We see that universities in the Philippines, such as the University of Santo Tomas and De La Salle University, are now pushing new digital transformation initiatives to implement ethical AI tools like Jenni into both learning and research workflows,” Mr. Wong said.

AI writing assistants like Jenni help ease academic workload by allowing users to focus on tasks that require more critical thinking, he said.

“By instantly cleaning grammar, suggesting specific phrasing, and automatically generating relevant citations, Jenni lowers the language and formatting barriers, enabling Filipino scholars to earn more recognition from top scholarly journals.”

Philippine users of Jenni AI mainly use its productivity features like the auto-citation, fluency improver, and outline builder, the company said.

Moving forward, Jenni AI is looking to roll out new features and product improvements every two weeks to better support academic users, including allowing document collaboration.

To help ensure the ethical use of AI, the company is also set to release an AI Usage Report feature, Mr. Wong said. This will help users strike a balance between their own inputs in their manuscripts with Jenni AI’s contributions.

This feature is expected to help users “ensure they are following the appropriate guidelines set by scholarly journals or their university,” the official said.

Another feature the company is working on is personalized article recommendations, where users can find new papers based on the sources they upload to Jenni AI.

The company also recently teamed up with CE-Logic, Inc. a local educational publishing and e-learning provider, to introduce AI solutions that can help enhance research productivity and learning in academic institutions nationwide.

“In partnership with leading experts and researchers, we’ve developed introductory and advanced modules to teach academics at every level how to use Jenni ethically,” Mr. Wong added.

The official said he believes banning the use of AI, especially in schools, is unrealistic.

“It is more important to keep the author in the driver’s seat, preserve academic integrity through transparent audit trails, and ultimately accelerate the journey from an idea to a peer-reviewed research contribution,” Mr. Wong said.