Recently, I read an article outlining Accenture’s new AI ultimatum to its employees: use AI or hamper your career ambitions. The message is clear. We are staring at a bullet train, and every company is trying not to be left behind. Whether you believe we are headed towards an AI bubble or not, it’s clear that AI will be fundamental to all consulting and technology companies, including those serving the modern law departments and law firms.

As an executive at Elevate, I oversee our Legal Managed Services Business Unit of over 600 employees globally. From this vantage point, working with some of the top law departments and law firms in the world, I appreciate the value that AI agents bring to our customers. However, I also see a stark difference in how companies are choosing to deploy them.

The Shotgun Approach

Accenture’s answer to the AI bullet train is clear: employees must use AI or they will be helped to the exits. Accenture, along with other companies, is taking the ‘shotgun approach’, throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Notably, McKinsey recently stated that it has 60,000 employees, consisting of 40,000 humans and 20,000 AI agents, focused on quickly adding as many agents as possible.

Now, these firms have decided that agents are a numbers game. The logic is that the more attempts we make, the more likely we’ll find the ones that will have the most value. I empathise with this approach, as everyone is asking themselves how to actually use these tools. But a crucial question remains: Are these agents adding value to customers?

The Conductor Approach

At Elevate, our approach is more deliberate. As an early adopter of AI, we acquired our first AI company in 2018, nearly four years before ChatGPT was released. We’ve been experimenting for years, but it wasn’t until recently that I saw our teams make the most significant gains.

We are moving away from what I call ‘Wizard of Oz’ AI, where the technology acts as a mysterious force, and users are told to ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’. Instead, our human experts are stepping up to serve as the conductor, while the AI agents follow their expert lead.

Our teams are experts at crafting process maps, playbooks, and workflows designed so clearly that ‘anyone off the street can read, comprehend, and deliver’ them. These processes are ripe for AI. By layering AI onto these deliberate workflows, we ensure the technology is actually solving problems. We’ve already rolled out agents for High Volume Litigation and Workplace Investigations, and that’s only the start.

Delivering Real Value

When guided by experts, AI agents have the power to drastically change how the law department operates. Specifically, they have the potential to:

• Speed up contracting cycle times and accelerate revenue recognition (music to every CFO’s ears)
• Identify trends in outside counsel spend to close matters faster and assign the right law firm to each matter
• Reduce the time needed to review litigation documents

In short, AI has the potential to materially change our industry. But at its core, AI is simply a tool, just like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. If you ask a finance expert to develop a forecast, they will inevitably use Excel, a sound, trusted software tool that professionals have spent decades mastering. But finance experts didn’t just learn how to open the software; they developed best practices for using it. With AI tools becoming more powerful every week, the legal industry needs to develop a similar cohort of experts. It is up to our employees to rigorously test, identify, and standardise how we best deploy AI so it delivers maximum value for our customers.

We shouldn’t and won’t stop experimenting, but our focus has shifted from open-ended discovery to execution, and the expectations are higher. Accenture is requiring its employees to use AI to be eligible for promotions. Simply using AI is table stakes. We must use it to deliver value to our customers. That is the metric I use for promotions.

How is your organisation approaching AI adoption? Are you playing the numbers game, or are you focused on building expert-led workflows? Share your thoughts via the contact form below.