Conditions For AI Success: Discipline, Data, And Patience

At both AALL and ILTA this past summer, I attended sessions where Brian Kuhn from IBM spoke about transforming the business of law using IBM's Watson offering. Brian offered a compelling vision of the future and when talking about Watson, while he did reference three use cases for Watson in the legal market, I did find it curious how much emphasis was devoted to Watson's success in the medical field. Given the degree of hype currently surrounding AI in the legal markets, I thought it relevant to examine this in a bit more detail. Despite the high degree of irrational exuberance (to paraphrase Alan Greenspan and Robert Shiller) around artificial intelligence, the reality is that applying AI to complex problems is, at best, a nuanced proposition and one that typically entails more investment than one may think. One highly publicized example can be found in IBM's agreement with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.