Recent surveys show more than 50% of American adults are using AI. From a business perspective, companies looking to leverage this technology must do so strategically and with great care, as there are regulatory, intellectual property, privacy, and other legal challenges to consider, as well as industry-specific risks and challenges. Our attorneys can help you navigate this important and quickly evolving terrain with our understanding of artificial intelligence law.
How businesses are using AI
Some commons ways businesses are already using AI include:
- Contracts – AI can help improve efficiency when it comes to contract management, drawing from a library of templates and clauses, comparing previous versions, eliminating errors, and creating an audit trail to show changes; however, while AI can be a really useful starting point for contracts, it shouldn’t be your endpoint.
- Intellectual property – depending on what services or products you offer, AI may be baked into your innovation processes.
- Customer data and service – along with trends and data analysis, marketing departments often rely on AI to improve the customer experience, ensuring they are engaged at every touchpoint.
- Employment/HR – employers benefit from AI tools to help rank and score candidate resumes, as well as predict talent needs and growth opportunities; however, without proper implementation and maintenance, there is a risk that the use of these tools may result in an employer’s violation of federal and state anti-discrimination laws.
- Media – especially on social platforms, businesses may use AI for monitoring responses, generating social ads, and suggesting content based on user interaction and sentiments
- International Business – for companies looking to expand globally, AI can help reduce overhead costs especially from importing and exporting good and decreasing cybersecurity risks.
The benefits of AI are apparent. Businesses can utilize AI to streamline processes, reduce manpower, and inform business strategies. Several service-driven business sectors like marketing, IT, finance and healthcare are embracing AI to help enhance their capabilities. While some employees and workers in these sectors find AI threatening, more often than not, it presents an opportunity for humans to harness the power of AI in a collaborative manner. Utilization of a tool as powerful as AI can raise several important legal questions, though.
Understanding Artificial Intelligence Law
If your business utilizes AI, you should also seek to understand its risks and legal implications. Some considerations include:
- Trust and accountability – when a human inside a corporation commits fraud or embezzlement, they are criminally charged for decisions they made and action they took; when an AI-powered system is responsible for similar activities, where does the liability fall?
- Governance – just as AI is still evolving, so are governance policies regarding how to monitor and control its activities; truly understanding the AI your company is adopting will help ensure your ability to govern it from development to deployment, especially as ISO standards for AI are still under development.
- Compliance – human interactions are at the root of AI training and algorithms can fail; businesses ought to regularly validate AI models through ongoing monitoring and analysis of outcomes to help ensure consumer protections remain in place.
Ethics is at the heart of each of these areas. As our society continues to learn about and embrace AI, there is concern about how the respect of human values is or is not embedded within the algorithms of a machine. Beyond that, how these ethics and values play out in the decisions and actions of AI systems is still being studied.
When it comes to artificial intelligence law, it’s important that businesses utilizing these technologies be able to demonstrate through documentation how they integrated AI into various business procedures, as well as maintain and follow policies that monitor use.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continues to make programmatic advances to protect consumers when it comes to AI use. Businesses should be mindful of proposed and finalized FTC rules to maintain compliance.
Business legal support for AI use
AI is a helpful technology that can be successfully implemented by a company when properly harnessed by humans. With the growing adoption of artificial intelligence, there are also growing legal liabilities. At the end of the day, the onus is on those who create, install, and use the technology.
At FLB, we have been here growing alongside our clients for over 35 years. Our attorneys are here to help our clients using or considering AI ensure best practices and legal protections are in place.
While we embrace new technologies, we pride ourselves on practicing law with a human touch.
