Assurance leaders are intrigued by the potential to automate their high-volume, low-value tasks and will double their department’s technology spend by 2027, according to a prediction by Gartner. The legal technology landscape is evolving rapidly, largely due to the impact of AI-enabled applications.
“Some assurance leaders are prematurely expecting AI technology to greatly enhance productivity,” says Weston Wicks, senior director analyst in the Gartner legal & compliance practice. “While these technologies show promise, in the near-term Gartner recommends assurance leaders identify where they can pilot and experiment with them while maintaining healthy skepticism as they are implemented.”
Accordingly, Gartner experts have placed AI in the Assurance Practice at the Peak of Inflated Expectations in the 2024 Hype Cycle for Legal, Risk, Compliance and Audit technologies.
Hype Cycle for Legal, Risk, Compliance and Audit Technologies, 2024
Source: Gartner (November 2024)
“Certain notable movements on the 2024 Hype Cycle are driven by assurance leaders convinced that incorporating new technology and generative AI (GenAI) tools is necessary to manage the growing burden of new rules and regulations imposed on executives and enterprises globally,” says Wicks. “Select emerging innovations, such as compliance monitoring solutions, have been directly impacted by GenAI and have seen substantial movement along the Hype Cycle as a result.”
Gartner experts believe that GenAI will have a foreseeable impact on adjacent innovations in the analytics space, and therefore certain innovations (e.g., data and analytics governance, audit analytics, legal analytics, and advanced contract analytics) have moved further toward the trough as the time to plateau for these innovations becomes nearer-term — two to five years.
“If they haven’t already, assurance leaders should be paying closest attention to more mature innovations near the Plateau of Productivity, such as corporate legal operations technology, contract life cycle management and privacy management tools that can likely deliver more immediate productivity gains,” said Wicks.
While there are some expectations that the advancements in GenAI will be transformative in assurance, Gartner experts caution that early adopters must acknowledge the risks of these new advancements and their impact on teams’ ability to manage them.
“Early lessons learned by assurance leaders include understanding the importance of information management and data governance, and the importance of intentionally including humans in the loop to mitigate bias and other risks,” says Wicks. “For these reasons, Gartner estimates the innovations will achieve high benefit ratings across the next five years.