You Need a Challenge Network

 Good thought, agreed, always worked best when challenged. 

Why You Need a ‘Challenge Network’  in K@W

In the following excerpt from his new book, Think Again, Wharton management professor Adam Grant explains why success often comes from surrounding ourselves with “disagreeable” people – skeptics who can point out blind spots, question assumptions and help us overcome our weaknesses.

In 2000 Pixar was on fire. Their teams had used computers to rethink animation in their first blockbuster, Toy Story, and they were fresh off of two more smash hits. Yet the company’s founders weren’t content to rest on their laurels. They recruited an outside director named Brad Bird to shake things up. Brad had just released his debut film, which was well-reviewed but flopped in the box office, so he was itching to do something big and bold. When he pitched his vision, the technical leadership at Pixar said it was impossible: They would need a decade and $500 million to make it.

Brad wasn’t ready to give up. He sought out the biggest misfits at Pixar for his project — people who were disagreeable, disgruntled, and dissatisfied. Some called them black sheep. Others called them pirates. When Brad rounded them up, he warned them that no one believed they could pull off the project. Just four years later, his team didn’t just succeed in releasing Pixar’s most complex film ever; they actually managed to lower the cost of production per minute. The Incredibles went on to gross upwards of $631 million worldwide and won the Oscar for best animated feature.  ... "

Using AI for Legal Contracts

Was just reminded of this effort: NAnalyze

Using Artificial Intelligence for Legal Contracts

" ... We made our first dive into how artificial intelligence is changing law practices a couple of years ago. At the time we noted that the $437 billion U.S. legal services market and the 1.3 million attorneys in this country aren’t going away just because of artificial intelligence and a few handy chatbots. Instead, AI will pick up the slack – initially – in tedious, repetitive jobs where it can be more efficient than humans. That brings us to legal contracts.

In an excellent analysis in the Harvard Business Review on how AI is changing contracts, writer Beverly Rich notes that the main challenge is the sheer number of contracts that law firms must track, many of which “lack uniformity” and are “difficult to organize, manage, and update.” That sounds like a job for natural language processing (NLP), a field of AI that deals with how machines understand (NLU) and generate language (NLG). The combined technologies help AI extract and understand unstructured and structured data. Part of the goal is for the machine to recognize context, which is a very hard thing for a machine to get because of the subtleties of our different languages.

Rich goes on to spell out the use cases and applications in using artificial intelligence for legal contracts:

“It can let companies review contracts more rapidly, organize and locate large amounts of contract data more easily, decrease the potential for contract disputes (and antagonistic contract negotiations), and increase the volume of contracts it is able to negotiate and execute… The use of AI contracting software has the potential to improve how all firms contract – and it will do so in three ways: by changing the tools firms use to contract, influencing the content of contracts, and affecting the processes by which firms contract.”