Updated to include more links to media coverage: Noah Waisberg, co-founder and CEO of Kira Systems (and author of “Robbie the Robot Learns to Read”) checks in to let us know that Deloitte has formed an alliance with Kira, “to drive the adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace.”

“Deloitte now has over 3,000 active users of Kira-based platforms, he said.  They have trained Kira to identify thousands of data points, and used it on hundreds of client projects—some over 100,000 documents—yielding 20–90 percent time savings,” said Waisberg.

Kira “will be working with Deloitte to bring the AI software to corporate clients at an even larger scale,” he said.

Among the media coverage
• “Deloitte Alliance Illustrates Growing Role for Data Extraction Software,” Gabe Friedman, Bloomberg BNA Big Law Business. An excerpt: “Noah Waisberg, CEO and co-founder of Toronto-based Kira, said Deloitte is the company’s biggest client and has over 3,000 active users of its extraction software, mainly in the auditing and consulting businesses. The software has a number of use cases including due diligence reviews, and any situation where a large data set needs to be searched, Waisberg said.”

“Under the new partnership, Deloitte will continue using Kira, but it will also try and sell Kira to its clients for ongoing use.”

• “IBM Watson enters ‘Big Four’ accounting firm duel for A.I. dominance,” Michael del Castillo, New York Business Journal. “While New York City-based Deloitte has selected Kira Systems to form its “alliance,” Holland’s KPMG went with IBM Watson, based in Manhattan’s Astor Place, to help modernize the way the global firm’s accounting data is parsed.”

• Legalit insider, Caroline Hill.
• Legal Futures, Dan Bindman.
• goingconcern: “Deloitte’s AI Play,” Caleb Newquist.

The press release

New York, March 8, 2016 — Deloitte today announced an alliance with Kira Systems to bring the power of machine learning to the workplace, an innovation that could help free workers from the tedium of reviewing contracts and other documents.

The alliance will combine Deloitte’s business insights in cognitive technologies with Kira Systems’ advances in machine-learning in creating models that quickly “read” thousands of complex documents, extracting and structuring textual information for better analysis.

This capability holds broad applications for the marketplace, said Craig Muraskin, Deloitte LLP, managing director of Deloitte’s U.S Innovation group, as the extensive review of documents goes into many pressing business activities, including investigations, mergers, contract management and leasing arrangements.

“Wading through miles of corporate jargon hunting for key words and patterns can consume considerable time and resources,” said Muraskin. “By teaming with Kira Systems we can help organizations reduce their review time while redeploying talent to higher value activities – let’s save our eyes for more strategic matters.”

Noah Waisberg, CEO of Kira Systems, said recent innovations by his company, such as Kira Quick Study, are graduating machine learning to new levels of accomplishment. “Artificial intelligence has arrived to a point where machines can scale human expertise by extracting information from complex documents,” said Waisberg. “It accurately identifies information by learning from examples versus just reflexively identifying pre-programmed clauses.”

Deloitte has been using the Kira platform internally for more than a year, creating custom models that generate quicker insights into a client’s particular challenge. It’s now possible for client teams to analyze hundreds of thousands of documents in weeks, putting them in a stronger position to advise clients in completing major business transactions under tight deadlines.

Deloitte-customized instances of the Kira platform together with Deloitte-trained models have been rolled out across the organization’s audit business under the name Argus and across its consulting business under the name D-ICE, with applications also being explored for its tax and advisory businesses. This successful deployment helped Deloitte receive the “Audit Innovation of the Year” award from the International Accounting Bulletin.

“Our approach to innovation is to use creativity and ingenuity in finding practical applications for the latest technologies,” said Ragu Gurumurthy, chief innovation officer, Deloitte LLP.
“That’s what Deloitte and Kira Systems are doing with this alliance – it’s bringing together two organizations working on the forefront of innovation in a way that can bring pragmatic yet powerful benefits for businesses in a range of industries.”

About Deloitte
Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax, and advisory services to many of the world’s most admired brands, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Our people work across more than 20 industry sectors to deliver measurable and lasting results that help reinforce public trust in our capital markets, inspire clients to make their most challenging business decisions with confidence, and help lead the way toward a stronger economy and a healthy society.

About Kira Systems
Kira Systems helps enterprises uncover relevant information from unstructured contracts and related documents. Our powerful, award-winning software excels at searching and analyzing contract text. Kira offers pre-built machine learning models covering due diligence, general commercial, corporate organization, real estate and compliance. Using Kira Quick Study, anyone can train additional models that can accurately identify virtually any desired clause. Kira can be deployed on virtual data rooms and other large repositories of contracts, creating summary analyses within minutes. Customers, who include some of the world’s largest corporations and professional services firms, trusted Kira on over $100 billion of M&A transactions in 2015. They also deploy Kira for knowledge management, contract search, analytics, and other use cases where visibility into contract provisions is critical.  To find out more, please visit www.kirasystems.com.

Monica Bay is a Fellow at CodeX, a freelance journalist for Bloomberg BNA Big Law Business and columnist at Above The Law.