Artificial intelligence (AI) is making significant waves across the globe, with experts predicting that it will increasingly change and reshape the way people live their daily lives. AI is also likely to shake up the legal industry; triggering a profound shift in the delivery of legal services. However, with such potential and power to drive seismic change to ordinary life and professional services, it has led to some debate over whether AI should be regulated. Professor Sylvie Delacroix, of the University of Birmingham, spoke to Thomson Reuters' Legal Solutions UK & Ireland Blog about her views on AI and the call for regulation. How significant is artificial intelligence and its role within society? The most significant development today is the extent to which we are capable of gathering and exploiting data to develop new kinds of knowledge which radically transform the way we live, for better or for worse.

Earlier this year, Thomson Reuters announced a partnership with Watson, IBM's artificial intelligence system. Thomson Reuters is committed to better serving its customers by providing cognitive solutions, and we are working on a number of initiatives in the legal and risk space. As part of our investment in artificial intelligence, Thomson Reuters is working with IBM Watson to accelerate the development of cognitive capabilities in our products. We have also recently established a Centre for Cognitive Computing which provides dedicated focus and resources to explore and develop in-house capabilities in the rapidly developing field of cognitive computing. I can't be too specific at the moment, but we are targeting to bring some capabilities into beta in Q4 2016, and launching a new product in the first half of 2017.