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Hello, and welcome to Decoder! I’m Jon Fortt — CNBC journalist, cohost of Closing Bell: Overtime, and creator of the Fortt Knox streaming series on LinkedIn. This is the last episode I’ll be guest-hosting for Nilay while he’s out on parental leave. We have an exciting crew who will take over for me after that, so stay tuned.
Today, I’m talking with Richard Robinson, who is the cofounder and CEO of Robin AI. Richard has a fascinating resume: he was a corporate lawyer for high-profile firms in London before founding Robin in 2019 to bring AI tools to the legal profession, using a mix of human lawyers and automated software expertise. That means Robin predates the big generative AI boom that kicked off when ChatGPT launched in 2022.
As you’ll hear Richard say, the tools his company was building early on were based on fairly traditional AI technology — what we would have just called “machine learning” a few years ago. But as more powerful models and the chatbot explosion have transformed industries of all types, Robin AI is expanding its ambitions. It’s moving beyond just using AI to parse legal contracts into what Richard is envisioning as an entire AI-powered legal services business.AI can be unreliable, though, and when you’re working in law, unreliable doesn’t really cut it. It’s impossible to keep count of how many headlines we’ve already seen about lawyers using ChatGPT when they shouldn’t, citing nonexistent cases and law in their filings. Those attorneys have faced not only scathing rebukes from judges but also, in some cases, even fines and sanctions.
Naturally, I had to ask Richard about hallucinations, how he thinks the industry could move forward here, and how he’s working to make sure Robin’s AI products don’t land any law firms in hot water.
But Richard’s background also includes professional debate. Richard was the head debate coach at Eton College. So much of his expertise here, right down to how he structures his answers to some of my questions, can be traced back to just how experienced he is with the art of argumentation.
So, I really wanted to spend time talking through Richard’s history with debate, how it ties into both the AI and legal industries, and how these new technologies are making us reevaluate the difference between facts and truth in unprecedented ways.
Okay: Robin AI CEO Richard Robinson. Here we go.
Richard Robinson, founder and CEO of Robin AI. Great to have you here on Decoder.
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It’s great to be here. I’m a big listener of the show.
We’ve spoken before. I’m going to be all over the place here, but I want to start off with Robin AI. We’re talking about AI in a lot of different ways nowadays. I started off my Decoder run with former Google employee Cassie Kozyrkov, talking to her about decision science.
But this is a specific application of artificial intelligence in an industry where there’s a lot of thinking going on, and there ought to be — the legal industry. Tell me, what is Robin AI? What’s the latest?
Well, we’re building an AI lawyer, and we’re starting by helping solve problems for businesses. Our goal is to essentially help businesses grow because one of the biggest impediments to business growth is not revenue, and not about managing your costs — it’s legal complexity. Legal problems can actually slow down businesses. So, we exist to solve those problems.
We’ve built a system that helps a business understand all of the laws and regulations that apply to them, and also all the commitments that they’ve made, their rights, their obligations, and their policies. We use AI to make it easy to understand that information, and easy to use that information, and ask questions about that information to solve legal problems. We call it legal intelligence. We’re taking the latest AI technologies to law school, and we’re giving them to the world’s biggest businesses to help them grow.
A year and a half ago, I talked to you, and your description was a lot heavier on contracts. But you said, “We’re heading in a direction where we’re going to be handling more than that.” It sounds like you’re more firmly in that direction now.
Yeah, that’s correct. We’ve always been limited by the technology that’s available. Before ChatGPT, we had very traditional AI models. Today we have, as you know, much more performant models, and that’s just allowed us to expand our ambition. You’re completely right, it’s not just about contracts anymore. It’s about policies, it’s about regulations, it’s about the different laws that apply to a business. We want to help them understand their entire legal landscape.
Give me a scenario here, a case study, on the sorts of things your customers are able to sort through using your technology. Recently, Robin amped up your presence on AWS Marketplace. So, there are a lot more types of companies that are going to be able to plug in Robin AI’s technology to all kinds of software and data that they have available.
So, case study, what’s the technology doing now? How is that kind of hyperscaler cloud platform potentially going to open up the possibilities for you?
We help solve concrete legal problems. A good example is that every day, people at our customers’ organizations want to know whether they’re doing something that’s compliant with their company policies. Those policies are uploaded to our platform, and anybody can just ask a question that historically would’ve gone to the legal or compliance teams. They can say, “I’ve been offered tickets to the Rangers game. Am I allowed to go under the company policy?” And we can use AI to intelligently answer that question.
Every day, businesses are signing contracts. That’s how they record pretty much all of their commercial transactions. Now, they can use AI to look back at their previous contracts, and it can help them answer questions about the new contract they’re being asked to sign. So, if you’re doing a deal with the Rangers and you worked with the Mets in the past, you might want to know what you negotiated that time. How did we get through this impasse last time? You can use the Robin platform to answer those questions.
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Image: The Verge / Photo: Robin AI
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