Season four of the UKTN Podcast continues with a dive into how artificial intelligence is shaking up the legal sector, with Robin AI co-founder Richard Robinson.
In this episode, Robinson discusses the risks and opportunities for generative AI in the legal sector. The CEO explains why people will always be needed despite the rise of automation, how the government can regulate AI without sacrificing innovation and shares funding tips for startup founders.
You can listen to the full episode here.
Robinson co-founded Robin AI with Dr James Clough in 2019. The startup is using generative AI technology to automate many of the time-consuming and tedious tasks in the legal sector, such as drafting contracts.
In this episode, Robinson sits down with UKTN Podcast host Jane Wakefield to unpack how general use AI tools, such as ChatGPT, have great merit but should be approached with caution for use in specialised areas such as law.
The former lawyer describes Robin AI’s journey, recalling how it developed generative legal technology through an early technology partnership with Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company that has exploded to prominence and secured billions in investment from the likes of Google and Amazon.
“We’re really fortunate to have been one of Anthropic’s launch partners, which meant we worked with them prior to the public launch of their model,” Robinson says. “We worked very closely with their team and their engineers, and we’ve just been astounded by how capable the model is.”
Robinson goes on to explain why there are legitimate risks to using AI in areas like law, notably hallucinations – situations in which AI models fabricate events which are then presented to users as facts – and how Robin AI aims to manage them.
“The approach we take is that we try to ground the model as much as possible in things that are real,” he says.
He adds: “A customer might upload a document…and when we ask questions about that contract, the model is told in quite explicit terms and trained to only answer with reference to the document or only answer with reference to trusted sources that we feed it.”
This season of the UKTN Podcast is sponsored by HSBC Innovation Banking, which offers flexible banking solutions for startups, scaleups, growth businesses, investors and those working towards IPO.
Listen to the full episode here, along with all previous episodes of the UKTN Podcast.
Throughout the series, the UKTN Podcast will be speaking to some of the key movers and shakers from UK tech. We’ll learn growth strategies from both seasoned and up-and-coming founders, hear market sentiments from investors, and question policymakers on the decisions shaping technology businesses across the country.
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