- In a world first, artificial intelligence demonstrated the ability to negotiate a contract autonomously with another artificial intelligence without any human involvement.
- At Luminance’s London headquarters, the company demonstrated its AI, called Autopilot, negotiating a non-disclosure agreement in a matter of minutes.
- It marks the first time an AI has ever negotiated a contract with another AI, with no human involved.
- The only layer that still requires a human is the signing of the agreement.
In a world first, artificial intelligence demonstrated the ability to negotiate a contract autonomously with another artificial intelligence without any human involvement.
British AI firm Luminance developed an AI system based on its own proprietary large language model (LLM) to automatically analyze and make changes to contracts. LLMs are a type of AI algorithm that can achieve general-purpose language processing and generation.
Jaeger Glucina, chief of staff and managing director of Luminance, said the company’s new AI aimed to eliminate much of the paperwork that lawyers typically need to complete on a day-to-day basis.
In Glucina’s own words, Autopilot “handles the day-to-day negotiations, freeing up lawyers to use their creativity where it counts, and not be bogged down in this type of work.”
“This is just AI negotiating with AI, right from opening a contract in Word all the way through to negotiating terms and then sending it to DocuSign,” she told CNBC in an interview.
“This is all now handled by the AI, that’s not only legally trained, which we’ve talked about being very important, but also understands your business.”
Luminance’s Autopilot feature is much more advanced than Lumi, Luminance’s ChatGPT-like chatbot.
That tool, which Luminance says is designed to act more like a legal “co-pilot,” lets lawyers query and review parts of a contract to identify any red flags and clauses that may be problematic.
With Autopilot, the software can operate independently of a human being — though humans are still able to review every step of the process, and the software keeps a log of all the changes made by the AI.
CNBC took a look at the tech in action in a demonstration at Luminance’s London offices. It’s super quick. Clauses were analyzed, changes were made, and the contract was finalized in a matter of minutes.
Legal ‘autopilot’
There are two lawyers on either side of the agreement: Luminance’s general counsel and general counsel for one of Luminance’s clients — research firm ProSapient.
Two monitors on either side of the room show photos of the lawyers involved — but the forces driving the contract analysis, scrutinizing its contents and making recommendations are entirely AI.
In the demonstration, the AI negotiators go back and forth on a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, that one party wants the other to sign. NDAs are a bugbear in the legal profession, not least because they impose strict confidentiality limits and require lengthy scrutiny, Glucina said.
“Commercial teams are often waiting on legal teams to get their NDAs done in order to move things to the next stage,” Glucina told CNBC. “So it can hold up revenue, it can hold up new business partnerships, and just general business dealings. So, by getting rid of that, it’s going to have a huge effect on all parts of the business.”
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