ArtificiaI Intelligence: Friend or Foe?

Our guest writer Adam Bullion, General Manager of Marketing of InfoTrack, provides here an insight into AI and its potential impact on the conveyancing industry.

Whenever the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are spoken rooms fall quiet and images of Blade Runner-like scenes are conjured in people’s minds.

Such dystopian views have been propelled by sci-fi films filling us with fears of androids taking over the world and with it, human’s place in society. Whether or not you support self-driving cars or embrace digital assistants, AI is technology that only continues to grow in the modern world.

The term AI encompasses a plethora of functions, from machine learning to speech recognition and personalisation, which is fast becoming a feature of most digital services that often passes users by unnoticed. As is usually the case when all goes well, we don’t pick up on the changes to the way our devices work. However, disquiet around new technology isn’t a recent advent. Mathematicians were once fraught with concern around how the humble calculator would become a threat to their jobs, however the omnipresent tool is now built into every smartphone and most people wouldn’t dream of performing longhand calculations.

Just as the calculator created efficiencies for mathematicians and accountants, AI can free up time from process-based tasks for solicitors. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) recently published a paper reviewing innovations in technology within the legal sector. The report found AI will help with task-driven work, creating efficiency and gifting solicitors more time to focus on complex tasks. Increased productivity in administrative areas of the business enables firms to focus on the more human aspects of their company, affording them more time to build relationships with their clients and improving their experience, as it’s the human element of roles that AI will struggle to replace. While technology takes care of the nitty-gritty, you can provide a personalised service that will build your brand reputation and help your firm to grow.

It’s important to consider that we will take stepping stones towards implementing AI over time. At InfoTrack, our approach has been to apply AI in certain areas where it is especially useful to our business, implementing machine learning, where systems are given the ability to learn and improve from experience, to our services to identify trends and patterns; ultimately working toward returning searches to our clients faster, leading to greater client satisfaction. Allowing AI to become part of your business strategy in any of its various forms shouldn’t be perceived as a threat, but instead embraced to allow workplace roles to develop a more fruitful human-centric focus, giving rise to greater customer satisfaction, rather than  the rise of the robots.

At Groundsure we invest heavily in technology to ensure that we are maximising efficiency and generating our reports in the most intelligent way. The use of intelligent filtering of the multitude of datasets that feed into our reports ensures that only the most relevant results are shown in our reports. For a best in class example of this in action, take a look at our leading Avista report in which 106 million data points are analysed to produce the most comprehensive residential risk report on the market.