AI and Due Diligence

Artificial intelligence systems like AlphaGo and AlphaZero have already outclassed humans at complex games like Chess and Go, but that’s all they can do. So far, AI that can engage the full complexity of human intelligence hasn’t been developed. We can’t use computers to replicate the entire scope of a compliance team’s work, but certain areas of AI/machine learning research offer substantial assistance. Optical character recognition (OCR) can convert a picture of a document into machine-encoded, searchable text. Enterprise implementations of OCR are now commonplace. Natural language processing (NLP) encompasses a wide range of capabilities, including document comparison, machine translation and named-entity recognition. By automating the process of extracting meaningful information from a mass of paper documents, OCR and NLP can help move past time-intensive manual review to focus on more substantive issues. The author deals with problems of fairness and interpretation that arise when AI is used in the legal arena generally.