Startup lessons about artificial intelligence

New York

IN 2010, Kris Hammond, an experienced artificial intelligence researcher, and a few partners founded Narrative Science. The Chicago startup's software ingests and interprets numbers for things such as investment holdings, billing records and sports statistics, and transforms them into written summaries or stories.

From the outset, the company's technology was promising, but the timing was tricky for the new venture. It opened its doors the year before IBM's Watson publicly demonstrated the potential of machine intelligence with its Jeopardy! victory.