Back in June 2023 I gave a presentation titled "Generative AI: Opportunities and risks for property transactions" in which I demoed an internal AI Assistant project that my team and I had been building ever since ChatGPT launched to the world in November 2022 and it became abundantly obvious this new Generative AI technology had the potential to transform the legal industry. We received a tremendous amount of engagement off the back of my presentation and much of it was from customers wanting to get their hands on this AI Assistant that we built so they could try it out for themselves. Because our initial AI Assistant was only an internal tool, we need to pull it out of our backend application and productionise it for law firms and other companies so they could begin trialing it and giving us feedback.
Fast forward a few months once we had ironed out a number of challenging technical problems with building a bleeding edge AI system built on top of the latest large language models (LLMs), our own customised prompt engineering, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system and our own proprietary legal specific document OCR and structuring technology all the while controlling for the eye-watering costs of some of the more powerful LLMs like OpenAI's GPT-4.
Today BCLP and Orbital Witness have publicly released the details of our "global design partnership to test, optimize and deploy Orbital Witness’ lease reporting capabilities in its latest generative artificial intelligence (AI) solution, Orbital Copilot, across BCLP’s U.K. and U.S. real estate practices." I'm proud to say that the AI Assistant I showcased at my presentation back in June 2023 has now taken on a life of it's own as Orbital Copilot and has a ton more functionality, improved accuracy, ability to work with any legal documents and is initially focused on lease reporting for lawyers and legal professionals as we build this out for BCLP and others. The press release goes on to say: "Orbital Copilot is the first real estate-sector-specific AI assistant created for real estate lawyers that is capable of analyzing and reporting on any real estate document. By leveraging Orbital Witness’ market-leading capabilities in real estate-specific AI and the deep sector knowledge and experience of BCLP’s global real estate practice, this first-in-market collaboration seeks to use this cutting-edge technology to enhance BLCP’s reporting on complex commercial leases, providing accelerated insights to their clients."
I'm also quoted in the press release alongside Samant Narula, BCLP’s U.K. head of real estate:
Andrew Thompson, chief technology officer at Orbital Witness, says, “A key part of our strategy with Orbital Copilot is to develop real estate-domain-specific AI that enables us to deliver solutions for property professionals that are incomparable in terms of capability, quality and reliability. This collaboration and pilot program with BCLP allows us to demonstrate and test that value at a firm that shares our ambitions and vision for this technology.”
BCLP has one of the largest legal real estate practises in the country, so they're a brilliant law firm to partner with for the ground breaking Generative AI product called Orbital Copilot that we've just built and launched to the world.
