Azeem Azhar

Or what might it do to the white-collar services market?

On the one hand, it reduces their footprint because so much of the generation and analysis work can be done by AI.

And we're hearing stories of paralegals coming under pressure because things like Harvey and other tools can do lots of the tasks that they used to do.

But that's a moment in time today.

And if you go back to where the analysts were seven or eight years ago, people were saying it was going to be routinized work that would first fall to AI, not this more non-routine work of open-ended research that a consulting analyst might do in their first couple of years at work.

And I think that we don't know how this will play out because these firms are adaptable themselves.

Who's to say that the market won't expand?

Now, hear me out.

Here's why the market might expand.

When you go and talk to companies who are trying to implement this new technology, they say, well, it's really difficult and it's difficult because it's ultimately a change and transformation project.

What does that mean?

It's a project that is about people.

It's about getting some people on side.

It's about getting tacit knowledge out of their heads.

It's about sitting down and figuring out experiments.

It's about deciding how to change roles and responsibilities.

All of that are people questions.

So the AI might be able to provide guidance, but actually getting people to change is going to take people to persuade each other.

And at the same time, these tools are going to behave in all sorts of new ways.

They're going to be new contractual relationships, new complexities.