119 | 🚶‍♂️💪 Productivity Hack for Walks

In today’s Brainyacts:

1. Law firms missing the boat on a new product/service

2. One of my most used productivity hacks with OpenAI

3. Mobile Bing Chat gets core GPT-4 option and other AI-related news

4. Judges get active on AI in copyright and use on their own and other news you can use

👋 to new subscribers!

To read previous editions, click here.

Lead Story

📡 🏛️ Spying Opportunity: Keeping abreast of regulation/legislation

Thomson Reuters just dropped a new report - The Future of Professionals Report How AI is the Catalyst for Transforming Every Aspect of Work. You can download it here. It has some great data but nothing earth-shattering which is not a knock on the report but more a reflection of how tightly certain narratives are throughout the global professional services market.

For instance, this finding is to be expected:

But something did jump out at me. It appears to be a significant area of interest and any AI-driven company looking for new product or service ideas should consider this.

Look at this graphic and what I have circled:

Keeping abreast of regulation/legislation is a top 1 or 2 priority for 4 out of 5 types of professional services teams. Notably, law firms don’t have it listed in the top 5.

The Creative Potential of AI in Law: Are Law Firms Missing the Boat?

The surge of global regulations presents a conundrum to professional services: How does one navigate this constantly shifting labyrinth without getting lost or overwhelmed? Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI). While embraced by many sectors, is conspicuously underutilized by law firms. This oversight is not just a missed opportunity for efficiency but a stark neglect of the possibilities inherent in this burgeoning intelligence age.

Understanding the Scale of Regulatory Complexities

To understand the scope of the challenge, picture this: in a single year, the US Congress alone puts forth over 4,000 to 7,000 bills and resolutions. When such numbers are multiplied across different global jurisdictions, the enormity of the task becomes clear. For professional services, the task of staying updated resembles a Sisyphean feat — seemingly endless and insurmountable. Herein lies the promise of AI, a tool capable of parsing through vast amounts of data with unmatched precision and efficiency.

Accounting and Tax Firms: Charting the Way Forward

Big players in the tax and accounting sectors, such as Deloitte and EY, have been quick to recognize the potential of AI. They leverage these tools not just for internal streamlining but also as a means to monetize their expertise.

These dual approaches, one inward-facing and the other client-centric, allow them to stay updated and even monetize their regulatory insights. Such forward-thinking not only boosts revenues but cements their position as industry frontrunners.

🚨 🚨OPPORTUNITY ALERT

Navigating the Regulatory Labyrinth: The Niche Advantage of Law Firms in the Age of AI

In today's dynamic regulatory landscape, staying ahead of the curve is more challenging than ever. As the influx of regulations grows globally, the need for tools that can monitor, interpret, and anticipate legal changes becomes vital. The introduction of generative AI into this realm has paved the way for sophisticated platforms that can not only track but also predict and simulate regulatory implications. However, while the technology itself is groundbreaking, its application and impact on the market depend largely on the entity wielding it.

The Big 4 (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC) with their vast resources, global presence, and multidisciplinary expertise, undoubtedly have a head start. Their ability to offer comprehensive coverage across jurisdictions and industries is unparalleled. Yet, this breadth of service comes with its own set of challenges. The broader the scope, the higher the risk of offering generalized insights that may not cater to specific, nuanced needs of particular sectors or jurisdictions. It's here that law firms, with their specialized focus and deep expertise, have a distinct advantage.

The Niche Advantage of Law Firms:

While the Big 4 provide broad, sweeping regulatory oversight, law firms are traditionally structured around niche areas of practice. Be it maritime law, intellectual property, or mergers and acquisitions within life sciences; their strength lies in deep domain knowledge, specialized expertise, and a tailored approach to client needs.

Integrating generative AI into such specialized frameworks amplifies this strength. The AI can be trained on specific sectors or jurisdictions, allowing for insights that are both deep and targeted. For instance, a law firm specializing in environmental law can use the AI to not just track global environmental regulations but also simulate how these might impact specific industries or regions.

Draft Basic Business Model: Specialized AI Regulatory Advisory (SARA) (Notice I even named as that is so in fashion these days 🙂 )

1. Core Offering: AI-driven, in-depth regulatory oversight and advisory for niche legal sectors and client segments.

2. Unique Value Proposition:

• Depth over Breadth: While the Big 4 offer a bird's eye view, SARA dives deep, providing insights that are rooted in specialized expertise.

• Customized AI Training: Generative AI models are trained with data specifically curated for the niche, ensuring highly relevant and precise outputs.

3. Target Market:

• Specific industries or sectors that require in-depth understanding rather than broad overviews.

• Companies operating in jurisdictions with complex, nuanced regulations that general platforms might overlook.

• Companies unwilling to pay for Big4 or want immediate application to their unique situation.

4. Revenue Model:

• Premium Subscriptions: Given the specialized nature, a premium subscription model that offers deep insights, customized reports, and interactive simulations is suitable, though uncomfortable for many firms.

• Consultation & Integration: Offering integration support and consultancy to ensure clients can seamlessly embed insights into their decision-making process.

• DO NOT GIVE IT AWAY FOR FREE!

5. Differentiators:

• Niche Expertise: The combination of deep legal expertise and targeted AI analytics offers insights that broad-based platforms can't match.

• Client-Centric Approach: Insights, simulations, and reports are all tailored to the unique challenges and needs of niche clients.

6. Expansion:

• While the model is niche-focused, it can scale horizontally by adding new niches or diving deeper into sub-niches.

7. Marketing & Outreach:

• Highlight case studies showcasing how deep insights led to better decision-making or foresight for clients.

• Collaboration with industry-specific events, journals, and influencers to establish thought leadership in the niche.

There ya go - hopefully, this sparked some moments of enticement.

Spotlight Story

Productivity Hack Using Mobile OpenAI App

You may have heard me talk about this before, but I want to share it with you again and show you how easy it is to do. This is one of the best ways I use generative AI to boost my productivity, and it’s so simple that anyone can do it.

Like you, I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk and staring at this screen. That’s not good for our health. I like to run, but sometimes I can’t, so I take a walk when I have a chance. It helps me stay fit, but it also helps me clear my mind, find my focus, or just relax a bit. Sometimes, I remember something I need to do or I have an idea I want to write down. But I don’t want to stop walking and type or write. I just want to talk it out, without worrying about the structure or the format. That’s when I use this productivity hack.

So what do I do?

I open my OpenAI app and press the vertical lines in the message window, and start talking.

Below is the transcript of my roughly 2-minute ramblings. After that is a screen capture of what this process looks like.

Once you see how I start the process in the first few seconds of the video, skip ahead to 1:58 to see the magic!

“So I need help basically just drafting an email back to a potential client I got off the phone with. So this is a Canadian law firm, roughly 50 lawyers, assuming roughly the same amount of business professionals, maybe some more. They want a generative AI intro session, probably like a lunch and learn style, no more than an hour, and you know, very rudimentary in terms of introduction to AI, getting into generative AI quickly. I tend to be very pragmatic and practical so I want to get their fingers on keyboards and practicing with some of the free tools out there like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. So I want to basically respond to her, send an email, follow up with like a draft proposal. So it's for an hour-long lunch and learn speaker series type program where I'll be introducing generative AI, talking about practice of law use cases and business of law use cases, helping them understand how to properly use these tools such as intro to prompting, what's a good prompt, what's a bad prompt, how to go deeper than initial prompt, also some of the ethics and risks associated with these tools and how to mitigate them and control for them, and otherwise rapidly get those who attend up to speed on using these tools and starting to experiment with them. So can you write an email to this person basically with a proposal that covers all that?”

AI Model Notables

• The EU and UK get OpenAI’s Custom Instructions function 👇

• Bing Chat gets GPT-4. Wait! Wasn’t Bing already running GPT-4? Yes and no. It was, but Microsoft changed it - thus why there are 3 modes (creative, balanced, and precise). See the screenshot below.

Now you can access the core GPT-4 model. See the screenshot below.

This is only available on the mobile app right now and is slowly rolling out. I got it last night. Why care? Personally, GPT-4 is still the better AI model for most of my needs and that is a shared consensus among many users.

• Google and its AI Personal Life Coach is coming

• Another day, another law firm AI model - this time UK Travers Smith  

News You Can Use:

➭ US Federal Judges rules AI art cannot be copyrighted - two articles here and here

➭ Another judge tries ChatGPT and is underwhelmed while citing hallucinations (wish people shared their prompt as my guess is many are poor promoters)

➭ US EEOC settles first-ever AI discrimination suit

➭ India’s Reserve Bank (RBI) wants to allow users to make transactions based on their voice via AI

➭ Canada releases Guardrails for Generative AI - Code of Practice

➭ 40% of global workforce needs to be reskilled in next 3 years due to AI, IBM study finds

➭ More schools are teaching ChatGPT (and generative AI) so students are not left behind

➭ How to teach using ChatGPT rather than banning or restricting it

➭ University of Michigan to provide custom AI tools to all

➭ AI companion robots reducing senior isolation in N.Y.

➭ The Associated Press has updated its standards regarding AI

➭ What are these models trained on? Now we have an open-source data model so there is 100% transparency.