AI's Legal Frontier: Why Your Next Tech Project Needs a Lawyer

Mark Smith: 0:14
Welcome to the Ecosystem Show. We're thrilled to have you with us here. We challenge traditional mindsets and explore innovative approaches to maximizing the value of your software estate. We don't expect you to agree with everything. Challenge us, share your thoughts and let's grow together. Now let's dive in. It's showtime. Welcome back, welcome back. Welcome back. We're on air again, mpp Summit is behind us, the world has changed dramatically for a lot of us and we're on the Ecosystem Show. Andrew, how are you?

Andrew Welch : 0:52
The world has always changed. For you, mark, it's always like every couple of weeks that we go without recording, recording an episode and then, yeah, the world has changed I'm in massive absorption mode at the moment what was your highlight of? This is a leading question, but, uh, what was your highlight from mvp summit is, to the extent that you can share yeah, hanging out with you, of course. I mean the extent that you can share.

Mark Smith: 1:14
Yeah.

Andrew Welch : 1:17
Hanging out with you. Of course, I mean, that's not even that. So what was? What's your second choice?

Mark Smith: 1:23
Hanging out with you, of course.

Andrew Welch : 1:26
Oh, great Okay.

Mark Smith: 1:27
Well, I think we can?

Andrew Welch : 1:28
I think we can move on Okay.

Mark Smith: 1:40
So I suppose the highlight for me was the clarity that I feel Microsoft is settling into an AI rhythm that is not reactionary.

Andrew Welch : 1:44
I feel this.

Mark Smith: 1:45
You know they've gone through two years of jamming copilot into everything and getting their branding and go to market kind of. It's kind of definitely been a assemble the plane while it's flying feel I remember, do you remember, mvp Summit two years ago?

Andrew Welch : 2:05
And that was very much like that was the feel. Though MVP Summit two years ago, I will say best MVP Summit I've been to, because that was when we learned about Fabric, but anyway, yeah, sorry, I interrupted you.

Mark Smith: 2:19
Yeah, the stabilization and and I feel that you know I don't know if it's confirmation bias, but you and I have been talking, all of us have been talking on this podcast for some time now, maybe even a year the extreme importance of purview in the ai story, the extreme importance of fabric in the ai story and, yeah, which is all about data governance, security I mean don't get me started on intra, id etc. Because that all plays a part in the story as well. Co-pilot for security got a lot of push at, I feel it, at summit. I just think there's a microsoft's vision in the space. I just feel it's on par right with particularly the purview and the the um fabric story, which enables then everything else yeah, well, so so it you know.

Andrew Welch : 3:16
Interesting that you that you mentioned that because it is this week is FabCon, or the Fabric Microsoft's worldwide Fabric conference, and and I couldn't be there for family reasons, but I'm quite sad to have missed it I would love to try to make it next year. One of the things that I think is emerging and this is a story that Microsoft has been kind of trying to tell for a couple of years since Fabric was released. But let me go back to last summer. I was working with a client, working with an organization that is they're a big enterprise financial services organization. They are the extreme of multi-cloud. I mean they've got everything in there. They have a data platform they've built with AWS, they use Microsoft 365. They have Copilot for M365. They dabble in power platform, they have ServiceNow, they use SAP. I mean these guys have they're building AI workloads in the Google Cloud. So this thing is this organization is. You know that's a decision you can make, right. But the problem that they were really wrestling with is that, wow, we've gone, we've backed into this multi-cloud world. Yeah, how do we bring all of this together? How do we bring all this together for use with AI?

Andrew Welch : 4:47
So the one thing that I knew I couldn't do, the recommendation I couldn't make, and for good reason, right, I couldn't say well, let's rebuild your data platform, right, they've just spent the last several years spending millions of dollars to build, to platform their data platform in AWS. So that was sort of a constraint that I had architecturally speaking. So I pitched to them this idea of using OneLake, which is a part of Fabric, and I called it the AI landing zone, which is a part of Fabric, and I called it the AI landing zone, nice. And my thought was that what we're going to do with OneLake, primarily, wherever we could, through shortcuts, and OneLake, obviously or not obviously, but if you don't know, shortcuts data not just from Microsoft technologies like Dataverse or Azure SQL, but it shortcuts data from Amazon S3 or from Google Cloud, know from from Google cloud. So my concept was let's use an and Oracle, right, so? So let's use off the top of my head, do you know, I don't know if there's a shortcut from Oracle off the top of my head.

Mark Smith: 5:51
Well, the mirroring technology came out of GA just recently. There's that option and I don't know if you've seen that the mirroring option for a lot of these workloads AWS et cetera as well is that it's free. Yeah, have you seen that, which is kind of like it breaks down that barrier of no. I've already done this in aws, already done this somewhere else, so I could take advantage of this free method of still bringing that data in for your ai landing zone.

Andrew Welch : 6:19
I like it yep, yep and and I I just think that this idea of using one lake as the sort of the final point of data consolidation and the technologies that Microsoft has developed from a cutting and from a mirroring perspective, treating OneLake as that final point, right, and thinking of it as the AI landing zone for your data, or maybe the data landing zone for AI, however you want to couch it, or maybe the data landing zone for AI, however you want to couch it, it's becoming more and more clear that that is Microsoft's vision and that that is a complete vision, or an increasingly complete vision. The world and the technology is moving so quickly today that calling anything complete is a little tough. But yeah, so I don't know how we got on this riff, but it is Fabcom this week. It'll be really interesting to see what comes out of it.

Andrew Welch : 7:12
But I just think that the other thing that I think makes Fabric and OneLake specifically so unique is that there is no competitor to it. Yeah, there's lakes and there's data platforms, but this is one where, for all of its faults and to me, the only faults I have with Fabric are that it is still a work in progress, right, it's like Power Platform five, six years ago. Right, but for all of its faults. It has no competitor, it has no peer, and I think that that's as someone who has been just obsessed with data platform tech, like when AI really hit the scene two and a half years ago and we we had chat, gpt, that that entered the market, which I cannot believe. It's been two and a half years now. I became a data platform geek far more than I became an ai geek.

Mark Smith: 7:58
So, um, interesting, yeah, I'm very excited about it do you know, and, by the way, I'm going to couch what I'm going to say is this was not an announcement, nobody even alluded to it, but one of my strengths is be as is has been able to connect futuristic dots in the space and draw conclusions about what I see. Yeah, my observation was this is that I think business applications is going away at microsoft in the next five years as we know it now. I think that the dataverse component naturally will go across to fabric right and and and, and that will become part of their suite. I then see copilot studio, which I feel is the last thing standing as look what we have inside microsoft now, and Apps is going to go to M365. And therefore, you know, it seems to be that's the only you know. The big thing that is on everyone's radar is the value from Biz Apps, is the Copilot Studio story, which is that, and the AI mix. So I'm just wondering.

Mark Smith: 9:07
I feel in my other observations across Microsoft that M365, a lot of modern work folks already thought that Copilot Studio was theirs.

Mark Smith: 9:16
They've already for some time thought that Power Automate was right Because of the SharePoint you know history and stuff like that. They thought Power Apps was because it lit up in SharePoint with that little purple button that said let's turn this into an app. And so I just see that there's. You know, as microsoft goes through a reinventing itself as an ai company, which it clearly is that you know you've seen mustafa come into the business and it is the ceo of um ai inside microsoft. The whole re-engineering part of the whole engineering org massively got reassigned to him in that move coming into Microsoft. And I'm just wondering if there's this, as they rationalize their business, going forward and AI really blends everything that I think their organizational structural models might start to change. And hence for me you know, I see my career, you know, although it's been a power platform for 21, 22 years now, it's really starting to lean much more to the data and AI kind of story and the work we're doing.

Andrew Welch : 10:52
That's a really fascinating excuse me, fascinating question, and let's definitely so. I have some thoughts that I'll share, but let's definitely explore that on a future episode when we have more of the posse here, because I'd love to know what Anna, some combination of Anna, chris and Will think about that. But know, listen, I have conversations with I have conversations with you know a combination. Sometimes it's with a you know kind of a C-level decision maker in a Microsoft customer and they're trying to, they're considering which technology to invest in. Sometimes it's with a Microsoft partner that is considering which lines of business to invest them in, to pursue. Sometimes it's actually with investors who are looking at buying a Microsoft partner. Potentially right, and invariably we talk about biz apps.

Andrew Welch : 11:53
Business applications has been an odd fit for Microsoft for a long time. Right, like, remember, microsoft is a platform company, so we sort of saw this coming and going right. Like sometimes, when Microsoft was doing really well and really wanted to expand beyond its borders, you'd get a lot of interest in Dynamics. Many of those Dynamics applications were actually acquired by Microsoft. They were not originally developed in-house because Microsoft felt they needed a competitor to SAP or to Oracle or to Salesforce or to whatever. So BizApps have always been a really interesting fit within Microsoft. First of all, I think that none of the technology within what we think of as business applications, dynamics and Power Platform. I don't think that technology is going away. I do think that Dynamics is going to be seriously, seriously rethought and not re-platformed is not the right way to put it but the whole concept of SaaS business applications are going to be very, very different in five years.

Andrew Welch : 13:00
We've talked about that on other episodes. You do raise an interesting point, though, about our platform. So I want to be clear in case anyone from Microsoft is listening to this. I'm not advocating a dismembering of that group or of that team or of that technology. But if you do think about it, power BI already has a foot in both worlds right, it's branded as Power Platform, but for all intents and purposes it's owned in Microsoft as part of Fabric right, as part of the data platform team, dataverse. I think that it's becoming increasingly difficult to implement Fabric or Dataverse independent of one another right, so it makes a ton of sense for Dataverse to really be the application, the transactional data orchestrator of the future for Microsoft. And then you know, for a long time I've said that the other Power Platform components, power Apps specifically, really are just a collection of Azure microservices with a marketing label wrapped around it. Yes, yes.

Andrew Welch : 14:05
So there's a very I mean this is a really interesting hypothetical going away as as ai and ai's ability to do a lot of the things that citizen developers previously turned to low code for. Yeah, but certainly doing making some moves there would really help microsoft in this foot into world's issue that it's had for a long time. Is power platform for serious application development, which we have long said that it is time? Is power platform for serious application development, which we have long said that it is, or is power platform a citizen developer tool? Right now, the answer is both, but microsoft has long had a marketing problem there yeah, I.

Mark Smith: 14:46
I think that like well, one year away now from power platform being 10 years old, right 2016, when it came out, I know the nomenclature came out of power platform in 2019, but the tooling was it was called. I know the nomenclature came out of Power Platform in 2019, but the tooling was there.

Andrew Welch : 14:57
It was called the BAP Mark, the BAP, the Business Applications Platform, bap. Yeah.

Mark Smith: 15:02
And I just think that, you know, will Microsoft 365 become a platform, maybe In the time ahead? It's just a positioning. I don't think any of the tech's going to go away. I think it's like it's becoming very mature now. It's a proven thing, you know. It has massive scale, massive um companies that use it at phenomenal scale, and so it's it's better down now and it's not something we're trying to sell as the new thing. And I do believe, though, within five years, the concept of menus, of lists and things and the way we display data will just not be a thing anymore, because you'll be able to get directly you know, with AI and things like that to what you need, without having to navigate and go oh, it's in this table, in this location, in this area, you know.

Andrew Welch : 15:56
As the hamburger once gave way to the ellipse, now the ellipses shall give way to nothing to the microphone to the microphone yeah, it's exciting times.

Mark Smith: 16:11
I had some good side discussions around red teaming with red teaming folks inside microsoft, which I think is is probably an under investigated area for a lot of companies.

Mark Smith: 16:23
And you know I spoke at the Canadian Power Platform Summit and did really my first foray into presenting on AI, as you know, publicly, after two years of consumption in the space, and we talked about trustworthy AI and really I referenced a lot the white paper you know that you wrote. You released in Vegas last year and I just see once again that is now really becoming into a mature model in that organizations need to understand that it's not just about building a use case or a workload right, it's so much more Rigor needs to be put around this. And another talk track that came out a lot was, for the first time in software development, the need for legal risk mitigation has never been higher or has never been like I. I can think of all the projects I've been involved in the last 21 years. At no point did we go listen, we need to get a lawyer involved in what we're doing Never Yet in AI. I feel that is definitely a conversation that's happening more.

Andrew Welch : 17:37
No, totally. And I think that the relationship between lawyers and technologists is really going to be changed significantly, really going to be changed significantly in the coming years. And, funny enough, I know I know a guy who is a lawyer, went to law school lawyer by trade who actually then went and learned to write code and is now a software engineer and he's a fascinating guy, right, like from that perspective. But one piece I have my advice for lawyers, particularly if you are, you know you might be a partner by now, right? You know, I think probably the sweet spot are partners or very senior associates, counsel, that type of thing, that type of area of time in your career where you have the juice and the knowledge, the background knowledge, to explore new things and to potentially build a new practice.

Andrew Welch : 18:41
But you're not so far along You're not a managing partner, right. You're not so far along where, if you decided to redirect yourself to the field of AI law, law and regulation pertaining to AI, that somehow at your firm the financial services practice would come toppling down. So if you're a more junior partner at your law firm, I would be seriously considering branching off and becoming seeking to become a leader in the legal and regulatory landscape around artificial intelligence and to build that practice within your firm. On the flip side, if you're a technologist, you need to figure out how to have a better relationship with lawyers who specialize in this realm. Not that you have a bad relationship you probably have no relationship. But yeah, I think that the legal, regulatory and ethics of artificial intelligence needs to be baked into the platforms that you are deploying and the workloads that you are building from the get-go, not treated like oh my god, we have to go defend ourselves if there's a catastrophe.

Mark Smith: 19:53
You know you wrote a post last week around Trustworthy AI that you published on LinkedIn, which I think is very poignant at this time.

Mark Smith: 20:02
I also wrote a post because I just felt so motivated coming off my flight back from the US, around the and it's something that we had discussed in the work that you've been doing in the UN and around human rights implications of AI and more than ever, you know, under the moniker of ESG.

Mark Smith: 20:26
We've done very good on environmental piece, but the social and governance piece is kind of like, oh yeah, we don't really like. How does that work? Even in Microsoft's industry platform suite, which they have a whole sustainability ESB, it's all on the S, but there's very low referenceability on the social part of ESG or the governance part. And I just think that in history we stand at a point where I'm not going to say that capitalism is broken, but we need to re-look at it in the lens of massive advantage scale that you get with tech and AI. That has never been seen in history before, where two or three you you know sam altman said last year, february last year, that we are going to go into a period of time where we're going to see one person, assisted by ai, create a billion dollar company.

Andrew Welch : 21:21
So the labor of one person, assisted by ai, creating a billion dollar business so I I went and I found this line, this sentence that I wrote in that post, which we should do an episode maybe next episode where we really dig into this post in more depth, because I know we're going to have to end this here in a moment. But what I wrote is we must prevent AI's maladies graduating from the realm of inaccuracy to significant financial calamity and again from financial calamity to the facilitation of, for example, cybercrime or sex trafficking. Yeah, and what I was trying to set up in that line, in that thought, was that a lot of folks, when they think about, when an individual thinks about what could go wrong with AI, we often think, oh, I mean this data, this response that AI has returned to me, is crap, right, like, I know that it's wrong or I know that it's misleading. So you graduate, like the maladies of AI graduates, from simply being inaccurate or wrong to something that is going to cause a significant financial calamity to whoever owns it. Right Like.

Andrew Welch : 22:30
So this is the chatbot I think it was Air Canada, they don't quote me on that right, the chatbot that taught someone how to reprogram a car or not to reprogram a car, how to hijack a car, right so? And then they were found. The company was found liable, right. So you go from inaccuracy to financial calamity, something that an organization would be very deeply concerned with, but then to things that we as a society need to be deeply concerned with, right, and the examples that I gave were the use of AI to facilitate cybercrime or sex trafficking, and these are, I think, very real. They are very real scenarios, they are very real possibilities. It's something that United Nations human rights is very concerned about, but, yeah, I think that there is a huge human rights dimension to what can go wrong with AI.

Mark Smith: 23:28
Now, just on that statement that andrew said, just I did a fact check quickly. It wasn't air canada that did the reprogram of the car. What air canada did that the courts upheld is that they must on a refund policy that their chatbot had issued and they tried to say it was ah, it was a chatbot, it wasn't us now. And the courts held no, you must do it. The actual crossover there with the chatbot how to hijack a car was another organization, it wasn't Air Canada.

Andrew Welch : 23:54
Okay, Cool, okay, thank you. Thank you for that. We have live fact-checking here. That was actually done by a human, but I'm pretty sure AI assisted.

Mark Smith: 24:04
I think that's all we've got time for. We've got so much more to explore. But thank you for joining us. If you remember, in the show notes at the top you can leave us a voicemail. That means your voice. We'll put it on here and if you've got questions you want areas to ask to explore, drill into, we're so keen to hear your ideas and opinions on these subjects. So with that, andrew, good talking to you. Ciao for now. Bye guys. Thanks for tuning into the Ecosystem Show. We hope you found today's discussion insightful and thought-provoking, and maybe you had a laugh or two. Remember your feedback and challenges help us all grow, so don't hesitate to share your perspective. Stay connected with us for more innovative ideas and strategies to enhance your software estate. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries and creating value. See you on the next episode.