Today’s episode of Pioneers and Pathfinders takes a slightly different approach. We are joined by Tony Thai, a returning guest, who is the CEO and Chief Engineer of HyperDraft, a contract automation software platform for various enterprises. We’re also joined by Byong Kim, Senior Director of Technology Innovations at Seyfarth. He runs Seyfarth Labs, which is a tech R&D team that leads the way in applying emerging technologies to the legal profession. Earlier this year, the three of us led a highly curated roundtable at Seyfarth’s New York office for in-house counsel, innovation leaders, and Seyfarth partners, where we had an open conversation on best practices for the implementation of AI and automation. This was a confidential conversation, so we didn't record it. Today, we won’t be talking about specific people or comments made at the roundtable, but we thought we'd go over what we had learned from it and how we see the progression of AI and automation in the industry, as well as best practices.

We discussed how generative AI is often treated like a "solution in search of a problem," how organizations are approaching implementation of the technology, potential security and confidentiality concerns with using generative AI, and advice for legal professionals starting to use this new technology.