Every day I speak to organisations around the world that are implementing Luminance’s Legal-Grade™ AI. With AI now thrust into public consciousness like never before, more and more people are excited by the possibilities this kind of technology has to offer. But this has also sparked a degree of scepticism and fearmongering surrounding the potential risks of AI, particularly in a professional setting. So, I thought it would be helpful to give some advice on how to make sure your AI implementation is a success…

Do Your Due Diligence

With so many products on offer in today’s market, doing your due diligence is more important than ever. Not all AI is created equal – from hallucinations to lengthy implementations, there are some “red flags” to look out for when comparing options…

For starters, hallucinations are common amongst generalist technologies. What do we mean by that? An example of a generalist technology is ChatGPT, which is trained on information from across the entire internet. This is great for planning your next holiday, but can be cause for concern in a legal scenario where accuracy matters. By contrast, Luminance’s proprietary Legal-Grade™ AI is a specialist, having been trained exclusively on hundreds of millions of verified legal documents.

Luminance is also entirely plug-and-play, in contrast to many legacy providers that use rules-based approaches, requiring intensive customisation and programming periods. True AI works out-of-the-box, meaning businesses should be able to see value from day one. Other green flags to look out for when identifying legitimate AI software include the ability to automatically handle different languages or terminologies and to be able to teach it new concepts and ideas on-the-fly.

And of course, there’s no better way to see what AI has to offer than by testing it out for yourself. With Luminance’s free trial, the whole team can see the value of it on their own documents and in their own environment.

Identify Champions

Having internal sponsors who are invested in the project really helps to keep it on track. Getting the support of business leaders and members of the executive team from the get-go particularly helps to ensure that successful deployment is treated as a top business priority. But the great thing about Luminance is that it’s a tool for the whole business. From junior staff who can be re-deployed to higher-value work and learn from knowledge that becomes institutionalised in Luminance, to more senior team members who can track and access critical information at their fingertips, having a range of champions across different teams and at various levels helps to ensure company-wide buy-in.

Establish Key Goals

Make sure you know exactly what you want to achieve with AI. From expediting routine reviews and reducing external counsel spend, to enhancing commercial insight and ensuring compliance, the possibilities are endless. But outlining a clear business case and establishing initial key goals is important. If everyone understands how the technology is going to improve their work and what problems it will solve, this vision inspires excitement and encourages commitment.

For example, for one of our customers, Hitachi, the procurement team wanted to reduce legal bottlenecks and enhance contractual insight. Now, with Luminance’s AI-powered repository providing critical datapoints and our customisable contract generation functionality enabling them to rapidly generate new contracts, the results speak for themselves: the team is saving at least 15 minutes per contract and an estimated 500 hours every year.

Another customer, Emma Sleep, adopted Luminance with the goal of streamlining and expediting their contracting processes, and have since managed to double the quantity of documents reviewed per quarter thanks to Luminance’s AI. What’s more, since a lot of the contracting process is going through the platform, this offers a really effective way to track and deliver metrics which demonstrate the value, creating appetite for adoption across the wider business.