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How firms can respond to the ‘democratisation of AI’
The executive director of innovation at a BigLaw firm recently discussed the importance of bringing digital literacy skill sets into a firm and how to do it.
Jess Feyder
Michelle Mahoney, executive director of innovation at King & Wood Mallesons, is at the wheel of designing and delivering innovation and transformation strategies at the firm. She works on legal service design, digital strategy and the application of artificial intelligence. She also leads KWM’s digital transformation strategy and execution.
“Foundational skills are needed to flourish in an ever-changing and increasingly digital world,” Ms Mahoney explained.
Digital literacy helps lawyers spot new digital opportunities to do something differently in ways that create value through the shaping and implementing solutions, maintained Ms Mahoney.
“Every organisation today is going through change,” Ms Mahoney highlighted. “We’re moving everything from analog to digital.”
“There is a democratisation of AI happening in our lifetimes — we’ve never seen this before,” she said.
“As workforces move, there are not enough digitally trained employees.”
“Given the volume of digital transformation, we can’t get enough people with digital skills; only through upscaling and rescaling can we prepare for the future,” she stated.
“Developing digital literacy allows us to respond to many challenges and changing expectations.”
“Everybody needs to have some degree of basic digital literacy,” she added.
“Data and digital technologies are being leveraged to grow not just revenue, but innovation, and new ways of working.
“It’s important to have the right mindset and skills behind it to take advantage of that.”
Ms Mahoney defined the term digital literacy, noting that it is the ability to navigate, evaluate, create, communicate, and use information in digital forms throughout various digital technologies, effectively and responsibly.
“It encompasses technology skills, critical thinking, and problem-solving ability,” she noted.
It is essential to build digital fitness within one’s organisation, she noted.
Digital fitness, as defined in a briefing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in late 2020, is about equipping and empowering a future-ready workforce.
It means people are empowered and capable of functioning productively in a digital business, she highlighted.
They interviewed 41 companies and surveyed 1,400 respondents and found that companies with a future workforce outperform their competitors, delivering 19 percentage points higher revenue growth and 15 percentage points higher net margin compared to industry average, she noted.
“Digital fitness is a lot like physical fitness, you need to keep working at it, and you need to do it often and build on it,” explained Ms Mahoney.
“Digital literacy is an enabler,” she continued. “It does several key things.”
It proves an intimate and dynamic understanding of the customer, it’s great for providing insights, streamlining processes, informing decision making, and for building cross-functional collaboration, Ms Mahoney outlined.
Adopting an organisation-wide approach to digital literacy is essential, Ms Mahoney noted; it allows all across the organisation to “nourish our digital mindsets”.
“We’re increasingly going to be exposed to AI and automation,” Ms Mahoney added, “and it will change the way we work and live”.
