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The View from the Client with Brian Beckcom
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The View from the Client
We spend a lot of time on this platform analyzing and theorizing what our clients need from us as their MSP and IT service providers, but we don’t often hear from the clients themselves. I was looking for a guest who could give us that type of on-the-ground insight, and I was lucky enough to find someone who also has experience as a computer scientist, philosopher, and podcast host.
This week, we’re unpacking an interview from a bonus episode of the Business of Tech with Brian Beckcom, the head of VB Attorneys and host of the podcast Lessons from Leaders. Want to know what clients think about AI these days? I have a feeling you’ll like Beckcom’s takes on the matter.
Let’s get into it:
Beckcom’s Background
Beckcom has a diverse skill set, but his main focus is the law firm he’s run for 20 years. He loves his job because he gets to represent people like teachers, police officers, firefighters, and families who’ve been victims of corporate misconduct. Though he started out at a big corporate law firm representing Fortune 500 Companies, he much prefers his current line of work, where he gets to be “on the right side of the law and represent real people.”
Before law school, Beckcom spent his undergrad years as a basketball player and studied computer science and philosophy. This unique blend of interests serves him well today, because, in his own words:
“A lot of the questions that we’re talking about from a technology standpoint aren’t technology questions. They’re ethical questions or moral questions. They’re philosophical questions.”
A Lawyer’s Take on Implementing AI
As the leader of a law firm, Beckcom is definitely the type of client tech service people would work with. But because he’s also quite tech savvy, I wanted to get a sense of where his head is at in terms of the ethics, frameworks, and guidance that needs to be put in place to make AI effective at his organization.
Turns out, he and his team have been using LLMs for about a year quite effectively. They’ve helped his office offload a ton of tasks, but at the end of the day, he still has to read the cases. He loves using AI, but very much believes that it’s not advanced enough to trust yet, at least not without a good amount of oversight.
So, what do people in our field need to do to ease clients like Beckcom’s firm into AI? How can we make sure it’s effective?
I asked Beckcom what he thinks, and he broke down the potential outcomes into two types of people: those who come up with ideas, and those who come up with the reasons a potential new idea is terrible.
“The point is your audience needs to understand, I think, that when they’re pitching technology, when they’re pitching new ideas, there’s two different types of minds that you’re pitching to. If you’re pitching to me, somebody who’s technologically inclined, man, just come up with the coolest ideas you can come up with, and I’m probably going to jump on board most of them. If you’re pitching to somebody like my law partner, they’re going to ask you a bunch of very challenging questions that you need to understand how to answer,” he said.
Beckcom also added this pro tip: professional circles like lawyers, accountants, doctors, and similar fields are usually a bit conservative in the way they like to do things – especially doctors.
AI in Practice
Beckcom referred to this tendency as sticking to “legacy habits.” He’s dealt with this a ton himself, like when he switched his firm from email to Slack and was bombarded with concerns (which quickly went away once people got fewer emails).
In Beckcom’s experience, he’s had success beta testing new tools within his own team and implementing only the best ones for everyone else.
The AI tools that made the cut include a transcribing tool for turning client interviews into a list of tasks and ChatGPT for brainstorming arguments. For ChatGPT, he noted that he gets the best results with very detailed prompts, and despite how incredible some of its ideas are, it also spits out a lot of terrible ones.
As you’d expect, LLMs are also useful on the research front, but they’re not trustworthy enough for him to rely on them completely. As he said up top, Beckcom still reads every single case.
Of course, we couldn’t get through our interview without exploring the “AI will replace everyone’s jobs” question. Beckcom and I are aligned on the belief that AI will free up a lot of time for more in-depth work, but he also believes that jobs in his field will very much disappear – specifically court reporters and videographers. However, he doesn’t see this as a bad thing; he thinks that people in these roles will apply their skills elsewhere with greater satisfaction.
Questions We Can’t Answer (yet)
And now for our philosophical portion. Beckcom has a lot of musings about the potential future of AI, so I asked him to run through some questions we don’t know the answers to yet.
First, Beckcom is curious about what will happen when people’s writing and thinking skills atrophy a bit as a result of AI. If you’re not a good writer to begin with, or you’re not a good researcher or you don’t know how to read case law, how are you going to check whether the ChatGPT answer is good or not?
Second, how are we as humans going to be able to process the amount of information AI can generate? You’ve got so much output that there’s no input anymore. There’s no time to digest what’s being spit out.
Finally, how much can you trust the confidentiality of some of these large language models? They’re created and maintained by for-profit companies, so Beckcom spends a lot of time thinking about how the stuff he’s producing with AI can remain confidential.
I’m of the belief that the technologists who are creating AIs are probably not the best ones to answer some of the big questions. Instead, I have a feeling that people who are helping businesses with their technology – AKA you and me – will be the ones figuring out the answers.
If you’d like to dive into more of Beckcom’s POV on AI and other business topics, check out his podcast Learning from Leaders with Brian Beckcom. And, as usual, I’m available for musings of your own at [email protected].
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