Conveyancers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to ask up to 3000 questions a day as early adopters experiment with Archie.
ARCHIE – the AI-powered personal assistant developed for the industry by Smokeball and triSearch – has answered more than 100,000 queries in its first 10 weeks of operation, with 65,000 of them coming from 4000 users in Australia.
Smokeball chief executive Hunter Steele says he welcomes the rapid uptake from those early adopters who have been willing to give Archie a try and to experiment.
“It’s worked for those early adopters as they’re quite experimental and they’re quite tech-savvy,” he says.
“It hasn’t worked for others because they like to be told what to do – and with this blank prompt box, they don’t really know where to start.
“And it hasn’t worked for others because they haven’t even tried it, because no one has really given them a valid use case to bother. It’s interesting learning that.”
While the rapid uptake is easy to quantify, Steele acknowledges that translating the figures into time savings is difficult. Those people who are using Archie the most are finding they are saving the most time because they are adept at asking the right questions, he says.
The three areas where Archie is being used most frequently include accessing an information summary, turning a large report into a few paragraphs, or finding a single piece of information about a date when something happened, Steele explains.
The bot is also used for drafting emails or letters, and to give a quick first draft of clauses and conditions.
“That’s where I would start experimenting with it – to try and get that work done,” he says, giving an example as: “A quick first draft of emails or letters where you’re talking to a client or the other side about something that is not a standard.
“It’s beautiful for that. You should never really have to start with a blank piece of paper again because you’re either using workflow-style precedence, or you’re using Archie to get you to that first draft.”
While the benefits are already evident, Hunter admits Archie needs tweaking.
As with any AI, it is only as good as the prompts and data fed into the system. And while 90 per cent of the information it has works well, that leaves 10 per cent where it is not good enough.
When a signed and scanned contract can’t be read and a question is asked, for example, Archie can’t give a good response.
“So we’re working on training models to really understand contracts, making sure that we can get through that blurry PDF and they’re getting pretty good at it,” Steele says.
The second part of an update that will be rolled out by the end of 2024 is access to a selection of predesigned prompting templates that conveyancers will be able to save and reuse, making it even easier and quicker for them to interact with Archie.
