We recently participated in an In-House Connect webinar all about “The Power of Generative AI” – you can watch the replay here.
This webinar, featured Pramata’s CTO, Pedram Abrari along with Teju Deshpande, Principal at Deloitte. While we can’t cover everything from this power hour in a short blog, these key takeaways will get you up to speed.
Generative AI is transforming the contract management process
During their discussion, Deshpande and Abrari talked about the transformative power of generative AI (gen AI) in the legal field, specifically in contract management. They emphasized that gen AI can analyze a broad range of content types and has the potential to streamline contract drafting, review, and negotiation processes. Despite the technology being relatively new and having some limitations, the panelists agreed that gen AI is already having a significant impact in the legal industry.
What is gen AI?
“Generative AI is a type of AI technology that can produce various types of content: text, images, audio, video, code, etc.” said Deshpande. She continued by explaining that the recent buzz around gen AI is in large part due to the simplicity of using it, compared to previous types of artificial intelligence that required far more technical skills on the part of users.
Gen AI challenges
You do have to be aware of, and look out for, AI logical errors and “hallucinations” Abrari warned. Logical errors, just like they sound, are times when the gen AI simply gets an answer wrong. “Sometimes you ask gen AI what’s four plus five and it gives you 12,” Abrari said. “It’s bizarre, but every once in a while it does.”
Hallucinations, on the other hand, are trickier to spot precisely because they’re statements the gen AI makes with confidence, even though they’re incorrect. Luckily, there are ways to avoid and reduce the likelihood of your gen AI going off track. One of the best ways of doing this, Abrari said, “…is to limit your gen AI to playing in a particular sandbox”. That is, to contain your gen AI’s purview to a very specific environment. In the case of contract management, this would be your digital repository of contracts. By doing so, your gen AI isn’t bringing in outside information that it could use to draw incorrect conclusions, which reduces the chance of hallucinations.
On the topic of AI challenges, Deshpande added that the cost, the throughput, and effective prompt engineering will be some of the largest challenges companies face as they try to get value from generative AI in the near term.
How gen AI acts as your legal assistant
During the webinar, Abrari showed a demo that illustrated exactly how the gen AI built into Pramata can serve in-house counsel by doing much of the “busy work” they would normally spend time on.
Some examples include:
- Analyze contracts and compare them to negotiation playbooks to identify areas of risk and non-compliance.
- Summarize the history of entire contract families, including master agreements and amendments to quickly get up to speed without reviewing dozens of documents.
- Summarize all orders from a customer, including dates, prices, terms, and other details.
- Read through historic contracts and create recommendations based on the terms of similar contracts, which can then be compared against new contracts.
- Draft contracts, giving you a massive head start with key information already written in legal language.
To see these functions (and more) in action, watch the webinar replay.
Clean data and proactive governance are critical to success
While discussing the potential of gen AI, the panelists also emphasized the importance of clean data and proactive governance. Like most cases when it comes to tech, the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” is particularly applicable when dealing with gen AI.
Abrari and Deshpande highlighted that the quality and organization of the data being fed into gen AI can significantly impact the efficiency and accuracy of the results. Moreover, they stressed the necessity of establishing a data-fluent legal department and focusing on proactive risk management.
“Having clean data will reduce biases in algorithms. It’ll enable higher adoption if less time is spent in prepping data for AI use and of course, it yields better insights and decisions,” said Deshpande. Abrahari added that at Pramata, “We only use services that guarantee that your data is private and your own. So having a gen AI model that is vetted for security and having making it available to your organization is probably lower risk than not doing that.”
The panelists also brought up some ethical considerations of using gen AI. For one thing, if the technology was trained on the internet using publicly available data, it definitely includes copyrighted material and could present intellectual property issues. They also noted that gen AI can generate biased content, and underscored the importance of having humans in the loop to curate and validate AI outputs.
Generative AI isn’t replacing jobs, it’s enhancing them
According to Abrari, “AI isn’t going to take your job. People who use AI are going to take your job because they get a competitive advantage.” This speaks to the vital human element, and to the fact that people who know how to effectively use gen AI to do their jobs better and faster will win out in the future.
As for Deshpande, her opinion is similar. “Humans are essential. They’re not going anywhere,” Deshpande said. “You need people to validate outputs that we’re getting from AI, as well as fine-tune insights that are derived.”
Both panelists expressed strong belief that gen AI will augment and enhance human roles as a tool that can help professionals become more efficient and effective in their roles. As it applies to the legal field and contract management, both believe it has huge potential to streamline processes and provide valuable insights.
For gen AI and contract management, the sky’s the limit
If you’ve ever dreamed of a lightning-fast assistant who makes your job easier and never needs time off, putting gen AI to use in the legal field holds an exciting promise. Right now, the Pramata platform enables legal professionals to do more in their limited hours with very powerful gen AI capabilities. But we’re still in the early stages of seeing what this technology can truly do.
“Every day we keep working with gen AI we discover the possibilities of what else can be done.” Abrari said. “This notion of an intelligent engine that understands legalese, that can work on unstructured data, that can not only understand it, but apply logic to it and compare it to other texts, and do risk assessments and so on, I think we’re just scratching the surface.”
To learn more about how you can put gen AI to work to make contract management radically simple, schedule a demo today.
