Effective investigations

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in our personal and professional environments will undoubtedly be a leading force in shaping the world around us in the years to come. One particular area where AI can a game changer is within regulatory investigations - typically involving the review of very large amounts of data, trying to establish what happened and why.    

A sure sign that AI is really starting to bed down in our industry is the fact of its adoption by enforcement agencies. The SFO is embracing the use of AI in regulatory investigations, highlighting the importance for corporates to demonstrate that the most thorough and diligent approach has been applied to an investigation. With the explosion of corporate data the amount of data for review during an investigation is increasing - meaning that some investigations can take years to complete. The use of AI is proving to make this process faster and more effective by structuring large sets of data in a matter of months, allowing investigation lawyers to quickly prioritise their review. 

However, whilst AI can help to save time and expense, we don't believe we're going to see lawyers being replaced by robots any time soon - and studies by Deloitte, among others show that to date technology has created more jobs than it has eliminated. In the current example, AI cannot exist without significant human input to train and evaluate the results, particularly in the area of investigations where the nature of the data isn’t always so clear-cut. Human input is integral to define what ‘accurate’ actually means and, certainly in more complex cases, to analyse and respond to unexpected, opaque elements of an investigation. This article, from our DR team, helps to examine both the benefits and boundaries of AI within investigations as well as identifying potential future use cases of AI.