Innovating at the speed of AI: Microsoft’s industry Copilot solutions
Our industry-specific solutions enable businesses to adopt and integrate AI technologies swiftly and efficiently.
All in on AI is an ongoing series featuring interviews from Microsoft executives across the company about what transforming work with AI means to their teams. Through these conversations, we’ll highlight the challenges each industry faces and the lessons we learned that our customers can use in their own AI journey. In this episode, Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro interviews Corporate Vice President and Chief Legal Officer Hossein Nowbar.
When our teams face new challenges and are encouraged to try new things, they’re more likely to find new and creative solutions. It all depends on workplace culture. Over the years, we’ve helped thousands of organizations adopt new technology, and time after time we discover the same truth: culture is the engine of innovation.
So, what happens when an industry built on tradition and precedent finds itself at the crossroads of new challenges and established ways of working?
Recent surveys show 62% of legal professionals now report spending up to seven hours a week tracking and analyzing regulatory developments, and the overwhelming majority (73%) anticipate this surge in regulatory activity to continue.1
Like many companies, Microsoft is exploring how AI can help our legal teams more efficiently handle these new workloads at scale and deliver impact.
To recap our journey so far, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Vice President, Hossein Nowbar and Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro recently discussed how our Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) organization is integrating AI into their workloads to stay ahead of the curve. They emphasized the importance of strategy, data, and culture. By reimagining the way the team works, they are harnessing the power of AI to bring significant enhancements to the legal field, including better services, smoother operations, and more time for essential tasks.
Wherever you are on your AI journey, we’re excited to partner with you—whether you’re just dipping your toes into AI exploration or looking to build on your current achievements. If you’re facing the same regulatory challenges as many of our customers and are curious how AI can help, I encourage you to watch this interview.
Strategy in the era of AI
Build a foundation for AI success
Business strategyGuided by data and collective contributions, CELA defined a strategy and launched a departmental initiative to harness the power of AI focusing on three key areas of broad impact: enhance advisory services, streamline transactional processes, and strengthen compliance and risk management. A multifunctional team led by Hossein and his co-executive sponsor, Chief Data Scientist, Juan Lavista Ferres, was assembled to execute on a strategy focused on experimentation, technical development, cultural change initiatives, adoption, and beyond.
Better data means better AI
When asked about the biggest learnings from his AI journey, Hossein emphasized the importance of data and sharing it more broadly across the organization. To harness its full potential, AI needs access to vast amounts of high-quality data. However, gathering this data can be challenging, especially if it’s siloed across the organization with disparate storage structures and governance models. Navigating a legal technology ecosystem with various domain-specific applications requires consolidation and aggregation of data from those systems.
To address this challenge, the team built a data factory. CELA’s data factory is the foundation for their AI infrastructure to centrally and securely manage their diverse data sets and ultimately power AI solutions. AI and Microsoft Copilot, coupled with data infrastructure investments, are helping CELA to effectively transform vast amounts of data into valuable insights to accelerate AI transformation while also managing data privacy, security, and governance.
It’s not just about tech—it’s about people
The success of an AI initiative depends not just on the technology but also on how people within the company adopt and use it.
When AI and Copilot was brought to our legal teams, some team members were uncertain about how this new technology would affect the way they worked.
One of the first tasks was to help teams understand the tangible benefits of AI and Copilot through proactive experimentation and invite them to imagine what they could use it to do. CELA embarked on a range of experiments to inform opportunity analysis and bring about measurable improvements in efficiency, quality, and scale.
As the customer zero for all our products, we understand how it’s one thing for people to learn how to use a new tool, but it’s another to get them genuinely excited enough to truly adopt it.
As Hossein explains in the interview, to navigate this cultural shift, the team implemented a multifaceted approach to model, recognize, and incentivize innovation and experimentation.
To support this, the team established a communication and change management plan. A community of AI catalysts representing all practice groups was formed to help drive AI transformation. They also introduced recognition opportunities to celebrate team members who contributed innovative ideas.
You have to celebrate people who are adopting AI and showcase their efforts
Hossein Nowbar, Corporate Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, Microsoft
By encouraging teams to join in the innovation and showing them real examples of what AI can do, it helped ease uncertainties and fostered a culture that embraces AI integration in their work.
Upskilling empowers employees to adapt to AI transformation
Closing the gap in skills and knowledge is crucial for making the most of advanced AI tools. When companies invest in solid training programs and online resources, they’re not just teaching their employees how to use new tools—they’re showing they care about their team’s growth and future.
In our own journey, CELA established training programs to help teams adapt to new tools. For example, with support from Microsoft, the CELA Academy hosted the CELA Copilot skilling series, resulting in a 50% increase in employees using Copilot experiences in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.
Whether you’re getting started with Copilot or building custom AI solutions, implementing effective training isn’t something you have to do alone, either. The Microsoft AI learning hub helps organizations prepare for AI transformation with the Microsoft Cloud and offers tools for building AI-powered apps, generative AI solutions, bots, and other AI models.
You can also discover more insights from our AI journey, along with advice from experts in the field in Building a Foundation for AI Success: A Leader’s Guide. This guide can help your organization start using AI, inspiring your team to innovate and get excited.
AI tools like Copilot will help you save time on legal tasks
Microsoft ai solutions
Explore AIUsing AI tools like Microsoft Copilot for certain legal tasks not only speeds things up but also enhances work product quality, increases agility to support business velocity, and facilitates decision making. Employees get more time to focus on the work that matters. The team is leveraging Copilot and AI to deliver broad impact across CELA by prioritizing use cases, such as:
- Create efficiencies for regulatory work: Quickly summarize regulations, streamline analysis, gather research to stay up to date on industry news and legal developments, draft guidance, and provide actionable insights, empowering legal professionals to stay ahead of the curve.
- Strengthen compliance and risk management: Analyze large data sets, help proactively spot possible compliance issues, respond to requests for information, and enable agile and efficient action.
- Improve client Interactions: Redirect high volume low-risk inquiries to client self-service capabilities to deliver faster responses.
- Enhance advisory services: Quickly find relevant information across sources, including outside counsel work product, to facilitate rapid decision making, and draft communications tailored for different audiences verifying key advisory points are clear and relevant.
- Simplify transactions: Condense intricate agreements, pinpoint essential clauses, flag potential risks, compare contracts, compile insights, draft clauses, and research legal structures for increased velocity and better decision-making.
- Support pro bono: Impact the world around us by creating efficiencies to enable pro bono volunteers to help more clients in need in less time by using AI to empower volunteers with information they need and automate tasks such as form completion.
Join Microsoft on our AI journey
AI transformation continues at a fast pace. Every day, we are leveraging Copilot and AI, discovering the benefits and new use case scenarios.
In the end, the right culture is key. By fostering a culture that values new ways of working, companies can set the stage for a successful AI transformation. Forward-thinking leaders, like Hossein Nowbar, play a pivotal role in this success by actively supporting AI initiatives, boosting their teams’ and partners’ confidence, and modeling the change mindset needed to unlock AI’s true transformative value.
Adoption of AI is not a luxury for legal departments; it’s a necessity. It can never replace human judgment, but it can help us do our work better and faster.
Hossein Nowbar, Corporate Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, Microsoft
This interview is the first part in our All in on AI series that explores how Microsoft is adopting AI across our business. Next, Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft Chief People Officer, sits down with Jared Spataro to see how AI is helping human resources (HR) teams do more with less and to share the transformative best practices she used to drive some of the highest, fastest AI adoption rates Microsoft has ever seen.
1Cost of compliance 2023 report examines the top three operational insights, Thomson Reuters.
