Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from the Reinventing Professionals podcast, hosted by legal tech speaker and consultant Ari Kaplan, provided to Legaltech News. Kaplan speaks with Neil Sahota, an IBM Master Inventor and advisor to the United Nations, who is the co-author of the new book, Own the AI Revolution: Unlock Your Artificial Intelligence Strategy to Disrupt Your Competition (McGraw-Hill Education, May 22, 2019).

Ari Kaplan: Tell us about your background and your experience.

Neil Sahota: I spent several years as a management consultant supporting global Fortune 500 companies. When the business intelligence movement started, people thought machines were producing great insights, but they were really just collecting information. So, while others were creating reports, I was developing a series of patents on how machines look at data and draw insights from it leading to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Kaplan: What inspired you to write Own the AI Revolution: Unlock Your Artificial Intelligence Strategy to Disrupt Your Competition?

Sahota: I wrote this book to help non-technical business leaders understand AI, but more importantly, to empower and enable them. The book highlights how they can get started and become drivers toward the future, not just passengers. Artificial intelligence is no longer isolated to the realm of technologists. We need good business leaders to recognize the opportunity and identify practical ways to use this technology.

Kaplan: How can legal professionals unlock their AI strategy?

Sahota: First, they have to acknowledge the opportunity. Second, legal professionals should consider practically applying it to legal research, case management, recruiting, and jury selection, among other areas. Understanding the capabilities of AI can help professionals perform better or add value by doing something differently.

Kaplan: What are the challenges of implementing an AI strategy?

Sahota: AI is definitely not a magic bullet. While it has a lot of power, there are always two challenges in any AI initiative. First, it needs data. When it comes to artificial intelligence, you don't really program the machine. You provide a set of instructions that apply to a set of records. The system then learns by evaluating that information. The question is always:  Do you have the data? If not, can you collect, acquire, license, or create it? Second, once you have the data, you need subject matter experts to train the machine, which is like a three-year-old child who learns really fast and can earn a PhD in just a few months. Still, it needs experts to teach it about substantive areas of the law. The irony is that the speed of the machine is directly related to how much time people spend educating it.

Kaplan: Why is it necessary for legal teams to be thinking about the practical use of AI now?

Sahara: The legal profession has always been a little slow to change because lawyers do very well and often there is nothing broken that needs fixing. We are now, however, seeing an inflection point in the delivery of legal services. Today, an AI lawyer can evaluate discovery documents and generate responses in minutes without a human being. This progress is not going to stop. In fact, the wave is only going to get bigger so if you are not trying to disrupt yourself, someone is going to end up disrupting you. No matter how well things work today, someone is going to figure out a way to do it better, faster, and cheaper in the near future. As a result, it is imperative that all firms and legal professionals consider how they can apply AI and where it fits.

Kaplan: How can we filter out the noise and focus on the true value of artificial intelligence?

Sahota: It really boils down to understanding the potential of AI. I think the first movers will benefit the most because an artificial intelligence-powered machine never stops learning. The more experience it gets, the better it becomes and you cannot substitute anything for time. If a firm is creating a certain type of tool and has a one-year head start on everybody else, no one will be able to catch up because its AI keeps doing more and more.

Kaplan: Where do you see the application of AI headed in the legal field?

Sahota: There was a fairly recent case that questioned whether an Amazon Alexa could testify, which prompted lawyers to understand how it works and the basics of machine learning and voice activated devices. In addition, it is impacting the practice of law directly because a project that normally took an associate hours now takes an AI tool minutes. With that free time, lawyers will focus more on strategy and client interaction. One of the profound issues we face is how to craft a new model that works and what professionals can do to support it.

Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change, and introduce new technology at ReinventingProfessionals.com. He will be speaking about practical innovation in New York City on June 25th.