19 ASIAN LEGAL BUSINESS – JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 WWW.LEGALBUSINESSONLINE.COM COVER STORY as one of the very first teams to use Gen AI technology. Our 2,000+ legal, policy and government affairs professionals globally have started using Copilot for Microsoft 365 since around October last year. Our colleagues find the tool very useful, greatly enhancing our work efficiency and quality, so that we may focus our time on higher-impact work. For example, if we miss a conference call when we have a time conflict, Copilot may summarize the call and action items for us. Some other cool use cases that I enjoy include having Copilot to summarize long email threads, and to turn a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation. In addition to using Copilot in our daily work, we have a global initiative in which we invite our CELA colleagues to submit ideas on Gen AI applications for our team, to be built on Azure OpenAI services. We received an overwhelming response, with over 250 ideas submitted around the three key themes of “advise, transact and comply”. It is really exciting to see how some of the ideas are implemented and we may start using these new applications now. Are customers embracing the new technology, and what are their primary considerations in adopting Gen AI technology? Today, over 85 percent of Fortune 100 companies, including customers in highly regulated industries such as the financial services industry, are using Microsoft’s AI services. From our conversations with customers, most of them indicate that they are more excited than concerned about the use of AI. We understand that Gen AI technology brings up a lot of questions and concerns along with its potential, and we maintain regular dialogue with our customers to support their AI adoption journey. We are actively advocating for responsible AI and remain dedicated to collaborating with our customers to address prevalent concerns, including data privacy and security, output quality and potential distortions, responsible AI usage to prevent bias, and to ensure transparency and fairness. We would share feedback from customers and regulators with our headquarters, with the objective of facilitating our customers’ use of the technology in a legal, compliant, and responsible way. WINNIE YEUNG Chief Legal Counsel, Greater China Region, Microsoft Can you outline Microsoft’s vision for AI and how Microsoft ensures its customers can harness the power of AI safely and responsibly? AI is the defining technology of our time and has the ability to reshape how we work, learn and play. As technology advances rapidly, Microsoft recognizes the crucial need to balance the benefits of AI with responsible control, addressing the ethical and legal considerations related to AI technologies. Microsoft’s responsible AI work started in 2016. Throughout the years, we have implemented Responsible AI by Design, to guide how we develop and deploy AI. We closely adhere to our six AI principles – reliability & safety, privacy & security, inclusiveness, fairness, transparency and accountability – and constantly improve engineering and governance systems to put these principles into practice. We are fully committed to building trusted and transparent AI systems to benefit our customers and the society as a whole. To empower our customers to harness the power of Gen AI, Microsoft announced a set of AI Customer Commitments (AICC) in June last year. The AICC include (1) sharing our learnings about developing and deploying AI responsibly (including our Responsible AI Standard, AI Impact Assessment Template and Guide, and Transparency Notes, which are all available for download in our Responsible AI website1); (2) creating an AI Assurance Program (including regulator engagement support, risk framework implementation, customer councils and regulatory advocacy) to help customers meet the legal and regulatory requirements for responsible AI; and (3) supporting customers with dedicated resources and partner support as they implement AI responsibly. Building further on the AICC, starting from September 2023, we offer Customer Copyright Commitment (CCC) to our paid commercial customers using Copilot to address their concerns about copyright infringement. We extended the CCC coverage to include Azure OpenAI customers in November. In simple terms, if a third party sues a paid commercial customer for copyright infringement for our Copilot/Azure OpenAI enterprise services or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements resulting from the lawsuit. This is, however, contingent upon the customer taking certain action from their end, like using the guardrails and content filters built into our products and not intentionally infringing third-party rights. We firmly believe that this sharedresponsibility approach will allow our customers to explore the possibilities brought by Gen AI with even more confidence. Our Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, commented that “We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale”. We already see AI rapidly transforming work for organizations across the world and acting as a powerful tool for driving new benefits and productivity gains in every sector. We are super excited about the Gen AI technology and can’t wait to collaborate with our customers on their AI transformation journey. 1 www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/principles-and-approach
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