DATA SCIENCE MONTHLY MEETUP
Verso is an AI consulting lab founded by Kaveh Waddell and Patrick Swanson in July 2024. Based in San Francisco, the company aims to help newsrooms, business leaders, and non-profits navigate the AI age. Verso provides support to media organisations, non-profits, and business leaders worldwide. The company assists newsrooms in implementing AI and technology strategies.

Patrick is based in San Francisco, where he co-founded the AI consulting lab Verso. He helps newsrooms, non-profits, and business leaders step into the AI age, drawing on deep journalistic and technical experience. Verso offers AI training, strategy consulting, product design, and implementation. Previously, he was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University, where he explored the impact of artificial intelligence on the information ecosystem, especially on media and journalism. Patrick prototyped AI tools for reporters and editors, designed newsroom strategies, learned to code (in Python), and built entrepreneurship and business development skills. From 2013 to 2023, he was Head of Social Media for news at the Austrian Public Broadcaster ORF. In this role, he built its social presence on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook from scratch and grew it to reach a daily audience of 2.4 million followers.

Kaveh Waddell is a co-founder of Verso, a San Francisco-based AI consulting lab for newsrooms and nonprofits. Kaveh was a 2023–24 John S. Knight journalism and Human-Centered AI fellow at Stanford University; he was previously an investigative data journalist at Consumer Reports’ Digital Lab, a staff writer at Axios and The Atlantic, and a freelance reporter in Beirut, Lebanon.