Lawyer Monthly - January 2022 Edition

21 JAN 2022 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM HOW CAN DIGITAL STRATEGY HELP COMPANIES BE COMPLIANT? border businesses), as well as the speed with which the landscape changes, has had a comparable effect. Fortunately, many of these challenges are almost tailor-made for AI. From mindless chat to deep learning AI is the buzzword of our times, covering anything from chatbots to a self-driving cars, so we should define our terms. The potential to automate the routine and complex alike is at the heart of this buzz. At the simplest end of this automation is robotic process automation (RPA) which excels at repetitive, high-volume, data entry-type tasks like credit card applications processing. But when its rules run out, so does the ‘thinking’. Chatbots make use of natural language processing (NLP) to mimic human speech and text-based interactions. We are all used to these in our personal lives with the likes of Siri or Alexa, but we are seeing increasing examples of how chatbots are helping to provide answers or guided advice quickly and consistently (and 24/7). Examples include providing responses to frequently asked questions for KYC activities or automating the generation of NDAs using keyword detection. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) use ‘deep learning’, the pinnacle of modern AI. Their neural networks draw on vast quantities of often real-time data to acquire and evolve an expanding and ongoing awareness of what they need to do next. For all their bad press, AVs already do things that can seem, as Arthur C. Clarke famously put it, ‘indistinguishable from magic’. In between these extremes sit the many and varied forms of ‘machine learning’, which also combine great processing speed, large and multiple data sets and the capacity to learn and self-improve, but at a lower level of sophistication. Insurance companies already use machine learning AI to assess the likelihood that a transaction is fraudulent by monitoring 50-odd different data points, all in near real time. Perhaps most encouragingly, machine learning AI systems are now able to identify tumours in lung cancer patients much faster and earlier than expert radiologists. In compliance, where regulatory information load is such a big problem, this kind of augmented decision-making has a natural home. A combination of natural language text processing and a machine learning engine can help keep clients on top of legislative, regulatory and tax changes across many countries. These solutions scan any data source they are trained for (including internet sources) and consolidate the relevant information. Adding natural language generation capabilities can even create summaries that a human can work with. The right combination of solutions can free compliance professionals to work smarter by helping them frame better questions, including some they never realised needed asking. What if one person is a director across a very large number of jurisdictions and her statutory duties clash? Perhaps For regulators, the sheer volume and pace of modern human activity has made the scale of their task almost impossible.