TechCrunch Disrupt: How AI Will Shape the Future of Work

Insights from two founders moving the needle in traditional industries 

Sofia: To kick us off, starting on the idea of AI adoption more broadly, according to a 2024 Microsoft Study, 75% of knowledge workers use Generative AI on the job. And even in industries traditionally more hesitant, or even resistant, to adopting new technologies, we’re seeing increased rates of tech exploration and adoption. 

What are you seeing in your respective industries — Jordan, in the design world, and James, in legal – with Gen AI?

Jordan: Hi everyone, my name is Jordan, co-founder and CEO of Vizcom. What we do at Vizcom is essentially build creative tools for people that design for the physical world. To answer your question about how knowledge workers are using these tools, in our space in particular, it’s a pretty polarizing subject. When it comes to creative work it’s something people inherently thought that humans would be the only ones to do. Now that you see machines doing what we had labeled as creative tasks, it’s natural to have some pushback against this technology.

But I think a lot of people see something like Vizcom, that truly respects the human in the loop, and we’ll go deeper into that later, it allows them to see us as something that accelerates their process versus automates it. I feel that these are two different things and two different mindsets that are being adopted in the enterprise context: what is technically an accelerant versus something that is automating someone away completely, which is different from acceleration I would say. 

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Sofia: Over to you James. What is the context that you’re seeing in your space?

James: Hey everyone, my name is James. I’m the CEO and co-founder of DraftWise. We help law firms draft and negotiate contracts by taking advantage of their previous deals and previous negotiations, arming them with knowledge for future negotiations. We work with the biggest law firms in the world, including 5 of the top 10 law firms. Before DraftWise, I led a product team at Palantir Technologies and I hold multiple patents in AI and machine learning. 

To answer your question, if you have ever met a lawyer, you know that these people love pen and paper. Prior to three years ago, the industry had really only made a few software acquisitions. So the mindset shift that I’ve seen, that has been staggering over the past two years, is the inflection point a couple of years ago when suddenly every law firm went from an inexperienced buyer to a super sophisticated savvy buyer with an AI committee, a large procurement budget, and a lot of curiosity to learn more about Gen AI. They’ve not only played catch up, but they’ve more than made up for it with their curiosity and their interest.

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Sofia: James, building on what you said, on how traditionally they’ve been reluctant to adopt new technologies, do you think there is a moment of innovation that propelled this change in mindset?

James: I think that we all felt that moment in our day-to-day lives when our parents and our friends said ‘Hey, have you seen this thing called ChatGPT?’. That was the moment when everyone went to their lawyer and said ‘I asked ChatGPT to draft me a contract and it took about 30 seconds, why are you billing me 40 hours and forty-thousand dollars for it?’. I think that was the moment when lawyers said ‘Wow, so many of our clients feel like this technology is going to change our work fundamentally. We need to get ahead of it.’

What lawyers and firms have done is very smart. They know that they are new to technology and AI. To compensate for that, you can see this on Linkedin, more law firms have brought in Chief Innovation officers, heads of AI, and people both inside and outside of the legal industry who have a depth of knowledge in AI into their organizations to increase trust. 

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Sofia: And what about you, Jordan, in design, an industry that is about craftsmanship and human touch, do you see a similar shift?

Jordan: Once people started understanding the value and the capabilities of Gen AI and how these fit into their workflow, and started to see it more as a tool, I think that's when the mindset shift started to happen. A lot of this had to do with how companies introduce these tools into the workspace; truly understanding the sentiment across the space and inside the organization and how those artists and designers are going to be thinking about it. 

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Sofia: Especially in both of your industries, where people seek out skill sets and unique talent, how do you think that human touch and AI will work in symbiosis going forward?

Jordan: In our context, all the chairs you’re sitting in were designed somewhere before they became a physical thing. I feel that there’s some innate value to the human touch when it comes to creativity that we’ll get to see if machines are actually capable of. I think, for points in time, if not forever, the human loop process of actually designing physical goods that humans like is extremely important. 

You’re going to start to see emerging roles that didn’t exist before. Such as becoming a tastemaker whose job is essentially to understand the data curation and creative sense of what will derive the best results. 

So you’re still using human creativity, but where you’re using your human capital is slightly different than how you were using it before, which was purely on some of the manual execution of creative tasks. So instead of actually doing the renderings and 3D modeling throughout the entire creative process, maybe you’re more focused on becoming an expert tastemaker of the team, defining what looks and works the best for the problem you’re trying to solve. 

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Sofia: I like this notion of a tastemaker, James what are you seeing?

James: We don’t have nearly as cool of a name, they’re called knowledge managers. 

The reason you hire a law firm is for their counsel. It isn't because they can write a paper better than you can write a paper – it’s because they’ve seen the market of similar deals. They know what’s market for a series A, they know what’s market for a series B. They know how many board seats you should give up and how many outside observers you should have. They know the follow-up rights. They know what the market is at any given point in time as it evolves. You hire them to represent your interests in a negotiation. 

So I think, similar to your tastemakers, the role of the human lawyer will be as a strategist, saying based on the market and based on your deal history, ‘I believe that these are the comparable precedents we can look at’, and then let AI automate the paperwork to implement a strategy. The lawyer remains the creator of the strategy, but maybe they’ll use AI too to help better understand the market and grab insights and data that they wouldn't otherwise have. But ultimately, you need a human in the seat because business transactions are agreements between humans. 

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Sofia: Do you think then that AI will help drive better outcomes? 

James: I think the law firms that use solutions like ours have already been finding advantage at the negotiating table compared to other law firms.

Usually, the way that big-ticket deals work is that you have one partner argue with another partner that something is not market or that they never yield on a specific point. Imagine if you could actually confirm if they’ve yielded on points before, and say ‘Actually, why are you taking the inconsistent stance?’. If you can call them out on that, you can break down the credibility, and since every negotiation is really just a phone call between two people trying to win a long list of points, it makes a difference. 

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Sofia: Would you agree with that Jordan?

Jordan: Yes, totally. Around the idea that you’re getting a more positive outcome, I would say in the design context, the results, whether they're better is up to the person deciding what the needs are for the problem being solved. AI allows them to fail faster. Before, to get to that decision and understanding, of the feasibility of a product, would have taken much more time and a lot more resources. 

So I would say this concept of allowing the designers to fail faster innately does allow them to get to better results because they can go through a quantity of ideas that just wasn't possible three years ago. So this naturally derives a better product. 

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Sofia: James, today you work with law firms like Orrick and Gunderson. Jordan, you work with sophisticated buyers like New Balance, and Ford in the industrial design space. It seems like there’s a lot of top-down pressure coupled with bottom-up interest in adopting new technology. What are you seeing top down in terms of strategic priorities, roadmap, and budgets to implementing new kinds of technology? 

Jordan: We are very much a bottoms-up led go-to-market motion where community is first. We focus on the community and the designers that are using these tools because it’s very hard to sell artists and designers why something is useful rather than showing them why it's useful in the first place. If they find it useful, they'll naturally adopt it and want to share it with their friends rather than trying to convince leadership of an enterprise why they would need something, which works in different contexts for sure. 

But I would say for our kind of tool and product, it felt more natural to connect in a Discord server and actually get users, artists, and designers excited. This naturally turns into wanting to bring the tool into their company. I found that top-down methods can make artists and designers feel an obligation to use the tool rather than naturally finding that it is a tool that can solve a problem. 

A community-driven mindset leads us to a more cohesive customer profile that you know is aligned with your product vision because they naturally formulate around it.

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Sofia: So Vizcom has been more bottoms-up driven, James, what has it been like for you?

James: Imagine the polar opposite. If you’ve ever spoken to a lawyer or you have friends who have lawyers who work at large law firms, you know that this is an extremely top-down organization. A law firm is a partnership and it’s almost an apprenticeship in that you’re an L1, you’re an L2, L3, a counsel, an of counsel, an associate – there is a clear hierarchy. The deal teams have clear hierarchies. And the idea is, you take clear direction from the person right above you both in how you learn the work and the work that you do. So this is one of the unique places that a top-down model can yield strong adoption for new tools, even ones that are unfamiliar to people. 

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Sofia: And so you’re seeing a lot of top-down interest to want to accelerate AI as part of the roadmap, as part of budgets?

James: Effectively every customer at a large law firm has heard about this thing called AI. I’m sure they have their own AI initiatives and desire to bring it into their own organizations, and they’re forcing it onto their law firms too. They’ve all gone to ChapGPT, asked it to draft or negotiate a contract, seen how seemingly easy it is, and now they're expecting their law firms to cut prices or deliver things faster. Generally, law firm leadership recognizes that if clients want it, they need to serve it. There’s a lot of appetite, there’s a lot of budget, and there’s a lot of desire to learn more and bring it in. 

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Sofia: What do you think it takes to be successful in selling top-down and enterprise-grade solutions vs bottom-up or consumer-driven adoption?

James: You have to be enterprise-ready. You have to have to check all the security boxes. You have to have flexible deployment models that mingle your infrastructure with theirs. You have to understand networking incredibly well and be able to talk to their security and infosec teams through your architecture.

In the era of AI, people are bringing their own models or using multiple models in the cloud and have different authorizations for each model. The business side doesn't have much experience with this, but they have a hunger for it. The security side is very afraid of it, and rightfully so because they have to respect the policies that they give to their clients. 

Fortunately, if this sounds familiar, it’s a lot like the government, a lot like organizations that have sensitive data. Most of my engineering team comes from Palantir, and so does most of my initial team in the first couple of years after founding, so we’re very familiar with it.

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Sofia: So how do you build trust with those kinds of buyers?

James: Lead with transparency. Walk them through your architecture diagram, be consistent with what you do. The way you overcome resistance with a buyer is by leading with education. 

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Sofia: Jordan, how do you feel about that? 

‍Jordan: Leading with education and transparency definitely applies. One approach we take is actually hiring people from the community and essentially positioning them as product experts who are also known as sales engineers. Their responsibility is essentially to help onboard and teach these different design teams the actual use cases or applications and where they fit into existing workflows. People like New Balance or Ford are very much in the same camp of dealing with super-sensitive data. A lot of these guys are designing things that don't come out for another 4-5 years or so. 

Leading with transparency around architecture and where the data is going is extremely important in the space. Education is huge as a lot of companies have the appetite for these things but the structure and knowledge of how to go about bringing it on are the things that they're lacking in – which is ultimately our responsibility.

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Sofia: I’m curious what usage has been like and if there have been any unexpected behaviors? 

‍Jordan: So for us, in the paper-to-production workflow, you have a drawing, this drawing has to become a physical product of some sort. One thing that has been super interesting for us is that a lot of footwear companies are using our tool as a way to see their ideas in 3D really fast. 3D printing is a huge thing in the design world, allowing people to go from a sketch or line drawing, quite literally to something sitting on your desk after lunch. This has been super surprising for us to see how companies like New Balance see their shoes come to life much, much faster. 

Another thing is these emerging job roles. I think sometimes we forget that so much of what we do today didn't even exist a few years ago – like a CAD modeler, that’s a derivative of the invention of CAD technology. That person could not have done this prior to that. So a lot of these emerging roles are around curating creative data in an enterprise because what’s unique about creative spaces is that a lot of companies that have been sitting and designing things for years have a huge data bank of designs sitting in files. We’re basically enabling them to repurpose that data to help fine-tune and point these models in a direction that’s relevant to their design DNA. So when someone uses these tools, it very much looks like it came from the portfolio of things that they’re already working on, but that in itself takes talent and perspective that is becoming a new category itself. 

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Sofia: One thing you touched on earlier was AI acting as a colleague rather than an intern, what does this look like in practice?

‍Jordan: I would say a lot of AI tools right now are in this intern space, where the user has to put in a lot of effort to give feedback and point it in the right direction. When you start thinking of AI as a colleague in the literal sense, your colleague is someone you trust, who understands the context of what you’re trying to do, they'll contribute to the process, rather than you driving the process and telling them what to do.

Some people call this agentic, or agentic workflows – it's getting used to the idea that there’s a shadow version of yourself also pursuing the task that you’re trying to do, essentially allowing you to have more teammates to achieve the goal. 

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Sofia: James what are you seeing in terms of usage and adoption along this theme of colleague versus intern? 

James: Sure, I think we see really strong adoption. Some of our customers have told us this is the most they’ve ever seen software adopted at their law firms since Microsoft Outlook. But the really interesting insights I've had – and I guess it’s not that surprising when you consider all the other ways that I’ve described lawyers at this point – but the thing that surprised me was that senior lawyers make junior lawyers use the tool.

There was a leader of a deal team who was of counsel at a top VC law firm, she was trained on the software and then suddenly her entire team was using the software every day and we hadn't trained any of them or had them show up on the training list. We talked to her, and she said ‘I’m making them use it now, it makes them better, and so as their supervisor I make them do it.’ That’s when I realized that this is a model that can work in an organization like this. 

I want to believe that in our space, ideal human-computer symbiosis doesn't look like a human agent talking to an AI agent and going back and forth. I think different forms of software and different tools should take different shapes. General purpose tools that chat with you, sure can look like a chatbot. But tools that drive you from one place to another place don’t look like a chatbot. Self-driving cars and Waymos we see outside don’t look like chatbots – they can't talk to you. They’re car shaped, they have cameras and sensors, they’re built specifically for a narrow purpose and they’ll do that exceptionally well. You’re building a self-driving car, you don't build a human-shaped robot and put it in the car, you build it for the solution – and that’s the way we approach our software too. 

Takeaways for the Future of AI: How Software Empowers Human Capability 

Although the needs of designers and lawyers are distinct from one another, investigating the parallels in the way that these niche users have adopted and responded to AI, highlights technology's ability to transform work for highly skilled workers across industries. Here are some of the overlaps that point to how AI will shape the future: 

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Takeaway #1: AI as a differentiator: Automation can enable and enhance human capability 

AI will drive better outcomes on an organizational level, but both lawyers and designers want to and should remain, in the driver's seat. While AI is a powerful tool to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, the biggest unlock of this functionality is empowering humans to apply creative and strategic thinking. The value that both designers and lawyers deliver to clients in a service or product isn’t in the elements of repetitive tasks but in the elements of strategic problem-solving. Companies that strategically adopt AI will be able to better deliver the value inherent to their brand and knowledge. 

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Takeaway #2: Emerging roles: How AI is shaping industries and roles in unexpected ways

The adoption of AI doesn’t just transform individual users' workflows, it transforms organization’s ability to interact with their knowledge data at scale. Both Jordan and James pointed to the emergent roles of tastemakers. This industry-spanning emergence indicates that AI has enabled a new type of interaction with and visibility into knowledge data. Tastemakers are evolving to distribute and employ brand knowledge, whether in the form of precedent or creative data, to empower organizations to produce work that is better aligned with their gold standard.

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Takeaway #3: Successful adoption: Transparency is key with sophisticated buyers

Both lawyers and designers have shown an initial hesitancy in adopting new technologies into their workflows. To overcome this, both founders speak to the importance of putting the product directly into the hands of users and buyers. Developing products from a purpose-built mindset, aligning technological capabilities to solve discrete problems, and allowing users and buyers to see this for themselves, is a powerful tool to move the needle in adoption in both bottom-up and top-down adoption motions. 

Transforming top global firms: Learn more about DraftWise

To learn more about how DraftWise overcame the legal market’s hesitancy to new technology and is driving adoption within top global law firms today, connect with our team. 

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