We asked the Josef team to answer our own Q&A on its new offering
Melbourne-founded no-code legal automation platform Josef this week announced the launch of “Josef Q”, a tool that uses OpenAI’s latest large language model to turn policies and regulations into digital Q&A tools.
Josef Q is designed to help businesses to answer frequently asked questions, with Colin McCarthy, ex-legal operations analyst at Twitter and founder at Legal Operators, commenting: “You can upload a policy, train or untrain questions within minutes, and go live to your company the same day with extraordinary levels of accuracy. The speed of adoption is astounding.”
We asked the Josef team to tell us more.
What is Josef Q?
Josef Q is a new AI-powered product that enables legal, compliance and HR teams – anyone who manages policies in an organisation – to turn their policies and regulations into interactive, digital Q&A tools. It puts the power of large language models into the hands of subject-matter experts so that they can build their own tools, giving them the confidence that they and their organisations need to accurately answer questions about complex policy content.
Why do people need it?
Two key reasons. First, legal, compliance and HR teams have been telling us for a while that they spend far too much of their time answering the same questions over and over again. They’re under pressure to do more with less, but they spend too much of their time answering FAQs. When we set out to build Josef Q, we asked ourselves: “How can they spend less time answering questions, and more time doing the works that matters?” Josef Q delivers instant, accurate answers about policies at scale.
Second, the regulatory and compliance landscape is becoming increasingly complex – enterprises face this problem all over the world. Josef Q helps to ensure that a business remains compliant with policies and regulations by delivering answers to the business when they need it. Q&A tools built on Josef Q also create a paper trail, providing a record of every answer that it gives.
How does Josef Q address the risks of using tools like ChatGPT in legal contexts?
Josef Q is based on the same underlying technology as a tool like ChatGPT, but it is designed to overcome two key barriers to successful deployment in legal. First, a creator on Josef Q can limit the knowledge base from which the tool can draw an answer. This means no more “hallucinations”, because the Q&A tool knows that it can only answer questions to which its knowledge base responds. No searching the internet for something vaguely relevant; just simple, clear and precise answers to questions.
Second, Josef Q enables the creator to train their Q&A tools themselves. This aligns perfectly with Josef’s no-code approach to automation. Though the underlying technology may be complex, we are empowering policy managers – who know the contents of their policies and the questions they are asked better than anyone – to directly train the tools they build. This is “human in the loop” training by experts, and it is a key step on the road to enterprise-readiness.
Who would use this tool and what would they use it for?
Josef Q is designed for any team in an organisation that manages policies. The teams on the frontline of answering FAQs. In particular, it’s for subject matter experts who want to take advantage of this new generation of AI technology but who don’t have confidence in the accuracy and reliability of a product like ChatGPT.
We’ve been working in collaboration with a number of different teams to develop this tool, and some early patterns are emerging. For HR teams, Josef Q is working well for policies around entitlements, like parental leave or annual leave. Those policies are often complex in the way they’re drafted and questions about them are frequent, but with Josef Q, HR teams can create a digital Q&A version for the business to get answers to their questions.
For compliance teams, we’re seeing a focus on privacy and data policies, to answer questions like: “What can we do with our customers’ data?” Turning that kind of policy into something that anyone in the business can get answers about really quickly is often technical and complex. For Legal teams, the applications are broader, and often include more complex regulatory issues like anti-bribery or corruption, or are industry-specific and relate to highly regulated markets like transport and energy.
How is it different to other AI tools launched recently in the market?
Josef Q responds to the challenges and opportunities that large language models present by enabling the creation of controlled and accurate AI tools. This isn’t just ChatGPT plugged awkwardly into another platform. Instead, it is a purpose built product that responds to the problems faced by legal, HR and compliance teams today.
Josef Q is designed for a very specific purpose: automating answers to policy and compliance-related FAQs. It does not promise to be all things to all people. This has enabled us to design the tool so that it avoids some of the pitfalls of other generative AI tools. In taking complex policies and regulatory schemes and turning them into interactive Q&A tools, it’s an industry first. And, because the creator of the Q&A tool controls the content – both the inputs and the outputs – it allows them to build a compliance tool that responds to the needs of their company or team.
Josef Q is also uniquely easy to start using. Creators simply upload policies or regulations, train their tool with a handful of questions, and launch a custom AI-powered tool capable of delivering clear answers to complex questions.
Josef will launch a free beta version of the tool at Legalweek in New York next week.
caroline@legaltechnology.com
See also:
No-code legal automation vendor Josef raises AUD$5.2m as it eyes US expansion