What happens when you embed an AI engineer inside a newsroom and tell them to help wherever needed? At ProPublica, it led to “Spreadsheet Inference,” a method that combines the rigor of spreadsheet reporting with the scale of AI. This lightning talk will give a brief overview of how real investigations became product iterations, not the other way around. You'll see how the team turned iteration and empty into documentation, then code notebooks and eventually a fully featured Google Sheets plugin.
