Bloomberg has partnered with New York-based computational journalism startup AppliedXL to provide insights and predictive outcomes to their Bloomberg Terminal users.

As part of the collaboration, AppliedXL will parse publicly available data to structure news stories that predict early trends and provide relevant market analysis. The startup, as of now, will focus solely on providing insights from the pharmaceutical industry.

Under the Hood

The startup, which makes use of AI in analysing data and detecting trends, will help Terminal users get ahead of potential catalytic events within the industry. Similarly, the AI will also alert users to any anomalies or irregularities that could potentially affect the market as a whole.

One such example is AppliedXL’s detection of anomalies during a set of clinical trials by biopharmaceutical company Summit Therapeutics using publicly available data on the NIH public trial registry. The company later suffered a significant drop in shares due to the initial failure of its then-sole drug candidate, which was predicted months earlier by AppliedXL’s AI.

The startup will provide similar insights to users who have access to Bloomberg Terminal. In addition, the AI has been trained in regular editorial and journalistic practices, which will be exercised during the creation of their news stories.

The company is expected to access over 7,000 updates daily on ongoing clinical trials and generate upwards of 60 stories on the most relevant developments of the day. This will include both domestic and international interventional clinical trials.

“There’s no artificial intelligence without human wisdom. We use machines to understand the patterns in data, but we need humans to understand the contexts that influence them,” said AppliedXL CEO Francesco Marconi.

According to the company, to do so, their AI has been developed in collaboration with journalists during the training process “to review data, help develop interpretations, and validate the quality of the output.”

This is one instance of a growing number of media companies relying on AI. Earlier this year, Bloomberg released a paper on their own LLM, BloombergGPT, focused on the financial industry.

On the other hand, media companies have also begun collaborating with big tech companies like OpenAI to use their reporting. Most recently, OpenAI partnered with the Financial Times in a licensing agreement, with the latter’s journalistic work now cited when using ChatGPT.