This page honors the people and ideas that helped shape Sharon’s trajectory—and reflects the collaborative spirit behind her work.
Summer Flynn Writer, Editor and Coach
Collaborating with Sharon Daniels on Evolve was both an intellectual partnership and a deeply human inquiry into what it means to stand at the threshold of a new era of shared intelligence. At its core, Evolve explores the relationship between humanity and technology—specifically, how natural language technologies are transforming how humans interact with data, insights, and one another.
Throughout the writing process, Sharon and I spent countless hours in conversation. Some discussions were deeply technical, focused on the mechanics and implications of language technologies and artificial intelligence. Others moved into philosophical—and at times almost mystical—territory, examining the history of language itself and what it means that humanity’s most defining ability has now been captured in software. Those conversations shaped the soul of Evolve.
Our collaboration was highly iterative and centered on connection. We explored ideas together—testing language, aligning story, voice, and intent—and constantly asked not just what the technology does, but what it means for people. My role was to listen carefully, synthesize across disciplines, and help translate Sharon’s expertise into a narrative that remained rigorous, accessible, and distinctly human.
By viewing language as the connective tissue of human evolution—from oral tradition to the written word to digitized intelligence—Evolve invites readers to see technology as a partner: one that can amplify human creativity, judgment, empathy, and insight. Sharon’s years of global business leadership and deep understanding of natural language technologies anchor the book, while the narrative framework ensures those ideas are grounded in history, context, and lived experience.
Evolve reflects the belief that the most powerful stories sit at the intersection of innovation and humanity. By keeping language—and the people who use it—at the center of the conversation, the book offers a hopeful, informed perspective on the future of AI and communication. It was a privilege to help bring Sharon Daniels’ vision to life and to contribute to a project that challenges readers to embrace change, curiosity, and the next chapter of human evolution.
Adam Bryant Managing Director, ExCo Group
In mid-April of 2020, roughly two months into the pandemic, my wife and I were holed up in our New York City apartment, and, like everyone else, we were deeply worried about COVID-19, particularly in those early weeks when the science was less clear on how the virus was transmitted. With sirens blaring constantly outside and many people fleeing the city, we went into lockdown, buying masks and wiping down our groceries and struggling to keep an even keel. All the uncertainty—about the virus itself and how long the pandemic would last—felt overwhelming at times.
Thankfully, work provided some distraction. I’m the managing director of the ExCo Group, an executive mentoring and leadership development firm, and one of my roles at the firm is to use the skills I developed over thirty years as a journalist to do interviews with CEOs and other senior executives about their key leadership lessons and insights. Over the last dozen years, I’ve interviewed more than seven hundred leaders, starting with the Corner Office series I created in the New York Times in 2009, and now on LinkedIn, where my various series have more than 175,000 subscribers.
While my focus had always been around timeless insights on leadership, I pivoted quickly when the pandemic started, and I began interviewing leaders about the new playbook for leadership they were writing in real time during the pandemic to help them navigate this historic crisis.
Luckily for me, one of them was Sharon Daniels, the CEO of Arria. I first met Sharon in 2017, when I interviewed her for my Corner Office series in the New York Times. It was a powerful conversation, filled with memorable stories and insights. I have thought often about this particular passage from that first interview, as it’s a crucial reminder about self-awareness:
It’s important to take the time to have some self-awareness about what has influenced you, and what you stand for, and being conscious of what’s actually going on. One of my life principles is inspect your motivation about why you’re doing something. You want to do a self-check that you’re on the right path and that your actions aren’t driven by ego. That way, you can calibrate your actions and how you communicate around the right purpose. Otherwise, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment.
For our second interview, shortly after the pandemic started, Sharon and I connected over Zoom, and she shared an insight that led to a wholesale change in my approach for navigating the pandemic. Here’s the passage from our conversation that was burned into my brain the moment she said it:
This crisis is like a reset if you take the opportunity to look at things that way—for the work we do and in our personal lives… It’s an important process that we are able to go through as human beings. There’s disruption, and it causes motion of some sort. But then we figure out how to level out and find that comfort zone again, which is one of the beautiful things about the human spirit. But without disruption, there is no motion. So people need to focus on the idea that this disruption is causing motion, and I want to make sure it’s bringing us forward.
In that moment, Sharon had clarified the challenge for me: How do I take advantage of all the disruption? I got up off the mat, and with my head now in the right place, I decided to make the most of the coming months, even with all the uncertainty ahead. Since all business travel had stopped, I was now more in control of my schedule. A more predictable routine helps me when I’m writing, and I used the time to finish my most recent book, The CEO Test. I started running most days and dropped the dozen pounds that had crept up on me when I was traveling more for business.
It has been a reminder of one of the many paradoxes of life. While we often crave a degree of sameness and certainty (and yes, comfort), the stress and uncertainty of disruption can also lead to important moments of growth and stronger muscles for those times that require resilience.
And that is a central theme that Sharon brings to life in her provocative and enlightening book, fittingly called Evolve: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Technologies to Enable Superhuman Capabilities. As you will discover in the pages ahead, she provides a sweeping history of how humans learned to communicate, along with a penetrating look into how artificial intelligence will build and transform the science of natural language generation, which is Arria’s specialty.
At its essence, it is the science of turning raw data into an easy-to-understand narrative. And Sharon has applied that art form of simplifying complexity to this rich topic, illuminating an essential field of study that all human beings share: communications.
Lyndsee Manna Generative AI Executive and Thought Leader
Public Speaker and Professor at Drew University on AI and Entrepreneurship
Although all species have their ways of communicating, humans are the only ones who have mastered cognitive language communication. Language allows us to communicate what we know and transfer that knowledge and sentiment to others.
Every day we communicate and consume language with such apparent ease that we take it for granted. Starting around the age of eighteen months, most children begin communicating in rudimentary sentences like “More water,” or “Hands sticky.” Many linguists agree with Noam Chomsky’s assertion that language is innate and that children are prewired with a universal grammar.
Though they might unconsciously assimilate grammar rules from the people around them, children learn new words and patterns through interaction with other humans. They master language through pattern recognition and rapid learning, thanks to the adults and other humans around them. This modeling trains their brains how to use language appropriately (these are known as language models).
The human brain learns how to calculate when and how to use language and continues to evolve its own language models constantly over time through training. Natural language technology emulates how a human calculates when to use language—what we call language analytics—and how to use and put the words together—what we call cognitive linguistics. This is exactly how Arria technology works. We emulate the way a human brain calculates what to say, when, and why.
How we express our knowledge in language is fluid and constantly changing as what we know (data) changes. Although we can dynamically change the way in which we communicate to adapt to different constituents with varying levels of comprehension, humans can only do one task at a time. Through the use of Arria technology, humans’ ability to communicate and transfer knowledge dynamically can be done at machine scale and speed, processing large amounts of data and generating individualized communication in language that is dynamic and unique. This automation enables knowledge to be personalized and shared exponentially in ways that each individual can comprehend.
Barbara Kendall Performance Coach
Five-Time Olympian and Triple Olympic Medalist
In my early sports career in windsurfing, I was fortunate to have supportive leadership that modeled a values-centric approach. Those values reflected down to my teammates, and as such, we enjoyed collaborative fair play. We all trained together. We weren’t competitors; we were collaborators. The only way to get good individually was to work together. We shared the same view of competition and pushed ourselves and each other to perform at our full potential. We were only as good and as evolved as the people around us.
When I got to the Olympic games, however, I saw the dark side of competition. After all, there is only one gold medal, one silver, and one bronze. Governments pour so much money into their athletes that it can get nasty. It didn’t take long for me to understand there are two types of winning: one achieved by cheating and one by fair play. Though both ways might come with a medal, they are born from disparate values. When you win fairly, through a principled approach, it feels differently. There is honor, pride, satisfaction. You find that others lift you up and share the win with you.
In order to find the balance between competition and collaboration, you find others who reflect similar values as your own. You maintain a principled foundation. This doesn’t mean you are passive. It means you still fight and bring your all, but you lead with grace and integrity. This way, no matter who wins, you are all supported and, in that sense, you all win.
At the start of any competition or collaboration, you think of the end result: not the medals but the game. You think about how you want to feel when it’s over. How you want others to think of your game and your character. Then, you must bring your whole self to the game.
Though there are many ways of optimizing performance, they all start with a willingness to be open. Open to what? To seeing other perspectives, to collaboration, to competing with integrity, to feedback. The goal is to avoid being static. Each practice is different from the day before, because I’m different from who I was the day before. Each time I compete, I’m different from who I was before. From one Olympics to the next, I was a completely different person—not just physically but emotionally and spiritually. I couldn’t reuse the same formula that won me a gold medal the first time because it wouldn’t work again. That is intentional. As an athlete, my goal is constant evolution, and that’s a lesson that serves me in life and in career.
One of the reasons we avoid being static is because the environment itself is fluid, so being static doesn’t serve me at all. With windsurfing, the environment is constantly changing. There is little reason to practice a static formula because it won’t serve me in a fluid environment. Instead, I have to build a principled foundation so that I can rely on my intuition during competitions. If I had not trained in that way, I would have been left behind. Though I learned these lessons in sports environments, they continue to serve me, and those I train, in professional and personal environments as well.
Dr. Ehud Reiter Founding Scientist of Arria NLG
I am convinced such tools are even more essential today. For example, there is now a massive amount of medical data available to the public, including information from sensors on phones and watches, but this data isn’t useful if no one understands it. Doctors have also told me about cases where patients get stressed when viewing their health data because they spot something unusual and think there may be a problem, when all they are seeing is simply a natural variation and fluctuation in their medical history.
It is time to design tools that can summarize, explain, and contextualize data in a way that makes sense to Mary and the rest of us. This should also apply to all sorts of data, not just medical.
I would love to see natural language technology used to develop such solutions. Arria has developed revolutionary technology that extracts key insights from data and presents it as narratives to users. But the industry needs to build on this work to achieve this vision. We are required to work with massive amounts of data (such as medical records), which may include free text comments from doctors (etc.) as well as numbers and create narratives which work for people with varying levels of industry knowledge and literacy. We also need to make natural language systems interactive, so that Mary and other users can ask the right questions and focus on what they care about. Language systems should learn from their users, so they can get better at identifying and communicating key insights.
These are certainly some challenges, but I am also seeing real progress being made—both from universities (including my own research group at Aberdeen) as well as from companies producing products such as Arria Answers. I am convinced that we are on the right track to developing the universal system I dreamed about twenty years ago! It is exciting for me to watch this vision begin to take shape, and I am honored to be able to contribute to it, in a company that is helping to define the humanizing of data that works for everyone.