PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said today that it’s building a generative artificial intelligence chatbot to assist its lawyers and streamline their work as part of a growing trend of businesses adopting the technology as part of their everyday activities.

To build the technology into its legal services, PwC is partnering with Harvey, a company backed by the OpenAI LLC’s Startup Fund and founded on the company’s GPT-4 AI technology. Harvey provides artificial AI-powered capabilities that can streamline legal work.

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that is capable of taking in large amounts of data and “generating” new information based on natural language prompts. As a result, it can summarize large documents, generate insights, write research papers, answer questions convincingly and even hold human seeming conversations.

Thanks to these capabilities, the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has been integrated across a number of user-facing products that are backed with tremendous amounts of data, including Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search chatbot and Grammarly Inc.’s upcoming AI-powered editing.

In a 12-month contract with Harvey, PwC will gain access to Harvey’s legal AI and its capabilities to gain greater insights into legal briefs, summarize documents more quickly and perform tasks more efficiently. The company also said it intends to build and train its own in-house AI models to create customized legal and tax products to assist customers.

Carol Stubbings, PwC’s global tax and legal services leader, called the technology a “game changer” in the way that it would affect how the company worked with its clients. “Harvey’s AI solution marks a huge shift in the way that tax and legal services will be delivered and consumed across the industry,” Stubbings said.

PwC stressed that the new technology would not be used to replace lawyers or legal advice and that anything produced by the AI would be overseen by professionals. It would be used to help streamline their work and focus on acting as a tool to help them operate more quickly.

Professionals have already been exploring the use of generative AI in the past few months. The London-founded legal firm Allen & Overy already uses Harvey’s technology but said that it will serve only as a starting point and human lawyers would double-check the work. Professional consulting firm Bain and Co. is also experimenting with OpenAI’s technology.

“There’s understandably enormous interest in technologies that build on OpenAI and ChatGPT,” said PwC’s tax and legal leader Laura Hinton. “We’re keen to be at the forefront of market developments, using new technologies wisely and strategically. Integrating Harvey into our tax and legal work with care will help us further differentiate what we do for clients.”

In spite of generative AI’s emerging popularity, there are also a lot of concerns about its reliability and trustworthiness. Upon its debut, Microsoft’s Bing search chatbot would quickly become unreliable and produce misinformation. Google LLC found itself mired in controversy during the launch of its own generative AI Bard when it produced false information about the Webb space telescope.

Another fear is that sensitive data being shared with third-party generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, could be exposed or leaked. As a result, large professional services such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Accenture Plc restricted the use of the technology by their employees given the implications about privacy. 

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