Epona en Microsoft AI: An excellent combination

According to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the development of Artificial Intelligence is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet and the cell phone. Major changes can totally alter your company's business model. Will Free Record Shop still sell CDs if everyone uses streaming services? For your information: Free Record Shop went out of business back in 2014. It is essential for your company to make the right strategic decisions in time when it comes to applying generative AI within your organization. In making those decisions, Epona would like to assist you.

Epona was approached by the Microsoft Cross Solutions team this summer to ensure that all of Microsoft’s modern AI technologies will be integrated by default into Epona’s legal document and email management solutions for law firms and corporate legal departments in the coming months. Developments in Syntex, Purview, Viva Topiccards and SharePoint Cognitive Search are moving so fast that our customers can’t keep up. That is why we are integrating these new features into our products and ensuring that our customers can take advantage of the benefits of AI step by step.

Initially, these are relatively simple functions, such as automatic attribution of information to improve searching within the Document Management System, or functions where documents are automatically translated into English and available in your Knowledge Management System. Of course, specific requirements for systems used by multinational teams of lawyers must be taken into account. Can you just use production documents and emails with customer or product names to train the AI? Is it permissible for an outside AI service to search all of your firm’s securely stored files and place them in an external database? Some measures are needed to ensure that confidential information remains secure and AI functions are available only to authorized individuals.

The use of AI will certainly not be free of charge in the future. Pricing models of 5 cents to 30 cents per “prompt” are needed to cover the high energy costs of training the AI models. These costs should be monitored and controlled in a timely manner by investing smartly in processes that provide high returns at low cost. To this end, Epona has developed the Legal Graph, a service where you maintain control over the services your employees use. We strive to make innovative niche solutions easily available while providing cost-effective generic alternatives once new AI techniques become commonplace.

Your main task in the coming period is to explore the possibilities of generative AI. What does due diligence look like with AI tools? Is it possible to automatically and custom write 1,000 responses to objections received? How can you automatically rewrite 100,000 contracts or efficiently analyze a voluminous criminal file? Especially with large-scale processing, computers will quickly take over from humans. Give your organization until the end of this year to experiment and consider, but then make your choice quickly. Developments in generative AI are moving fast, and you don’t want to be left behind in a rapidly changing market.