Artikel geschreven door Elgar Weijtmans.
What programmers teach us about the future of the legal profession
Artikel geschreven door Elgar Weijtmans.
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, gave an interview to the Financial Times last week. Suleyman is no lightweight: he co-founded DeepMind, the AI lab Google acquired in 2014, and has been at the forefront of AI development for over fifteen years.
His message was, to put it mildly, not subtle. According to Suleyman, most tasks performed by knowledge workers will be fully automated by AI within twelve to eighteen months.
“White-collar work where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person. Most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next twelve to eighteen months.”
Now, bold timeline predictions about A(G)I have a rich tradition of being spectacularly wrong. This one may well join that club. But whether it takes eighteen months or five years is not really the point.
What immediately struck me was that he mentioned lawyers first, before accountants and project managers. In last week’s Beyond Billable podcast episode, Sarah Wilson-Ward of Elevate described what could be seen as the practical version of Suleyman’s prediction: how lawyers are struggling with precisely that shift.