I wrote earlier this year about the recent trend in automated journalism.  It has seen the likes of the Associated Press rely on automated systems to produce financial earnings reports for them.

Such systems are increasingly capable of producing complex reports autonomously.  At the heart of this revolution is the AI company Automated Insights whose Wordsmith product is powering many of these projects.

Automated reporting

Not content with automating news reporting however, the company is now turning its attention to internal reporting.  The product aims to turn basic data from spreadsheets into meaningful reports for its users.

The process is remarkably simple.  First of all, users upload a spreadsheet to the system, which then converts each individual field into a variable, which is then used to fill out a simple text template.

Should the user wish, they can apply various rules to the process, so for instance strong performance can be remarked upon in exultant tones.

Suffice to say, as the user still needs a good handle on their data to setup these rules, I do wonder just how much time is really being saved.  As with most innovations however, the first iteration is seldom all that polished, but it is an interesting trend and one that will be well worth keeping an eye on.

The indications are that it’s a trend with legs.  For instance, in the legal field, I’ve written about startups that are fact checking legal documents automatically, and then producing visual reports on what they read.

It will be fascinating to see how products like these evolve in the coming years.