This robot startup is trying to win the 5 trillion race to automate corporate jobs

In 2008, Max Yankelevich was in India, visiting the cubicle farms where big banks and insurance companies outsource business processes -- the invoices, memos, and other papers pushed to keep organizations humming. The employees were smart, says Yankelevich, who was running a cloud computing startup at the time. There was good money in doing this sort of back office work -- but it was mind numbing. Companies were trying to figure out the back office work with "the brute force of human power," says Yankelevich, who studied artificial intelligence while getting his MIT computer science degree in the 1990s. "I started thinking ... there's gotta be a way where artificial intelligence can be used generically enough to learn some of these things that these people are doing," he says.