Public Funding for Exchange House Services Limited

**Vision** AI technologies have the potential to significantly increase the productivity of the UK high-value services sector. However, current application rates to client engagements within top-tier legal practice are below 1%\[1\]. This project recognises that AI models can achieve good technical performance but that adoption is primarily held back by organisational and behavioural factors. The project addresses the organisational factors using a new architecture of 'AI microservices' and the behavioural factors with the application of behavioural change science, specifically Self-Determination Theory. **AI microservices** Existing sector-specific AI companies serve the market with products that provide broad data identification, reviewing or extraction capabilities. This requires law firms to bear the significant organisational costs of (1) identifying suitable applications, (2) configuring the software, (3) training the model, (4) training the users, and (5) managing the product output. Failure to justify these costs has resulted in low adoption rates. This project instead takes the novel approach of providing highly specific and pre-trained models, termed "AI microservices", which are built into existing workflow software used by the sector. **Behaviour change** Practitioners are cautious when adopting new AI-based technology. A culture of risk-aversion exists amongst practitioners as a result of the high-value nature of their work, their training in avoidance of risk and their taking of personal responsibility for their work. This has served to further limit adoption of AI technologies. This project uses behavioural change science to design software that incorporates principles of Self-Determination Theory to address these 'human' and cultural issues. **Objectives** The project aims to build and integrate six AI microservices into the high-value legal practices of the project partners and measure the adoptability of the resulting technology. The project starts with application within the legal sector to benefit from the consortium's sector specific knowledge and reduce contain complexity and costs. The project will subsequently result in public dissemination of learnings for the insurance and accountancy sectors. **Innovation** This project is uniquely innovative in that it adapts AI technology to the organisational and behavioural circumstances of the high-value service sector. We believe this approach will see increased adoption rates in comparison to asking organisations to bear high implementation costs and failing to address the behavioural psychology of practitioners. \[1\] Legatics market research.