Extract from Dave Ruel’s article “Spotlight AI: The story behind the feature”
Rethink Everything!
Hanzo’s journey in AI actually began well before the recent unveiling of Spotlight AI last week and the announcement that Hanzo won the the LegalTechnology Breakthrough Award for best use of AI technology this week. When I joined Hanzo as a senior product manager in November of 2020, Hanzo already had two data scientists on staff who were charged mainly with internal R&D projects and working within our Chronicle product line to help with Hanzo’s QA automation.
As time progressed, our Data Science team consisting of Aidan Randle-Conde and Jimmie Weiss began to transition from R&D more toward feature creation and productization for Hanzo Illuminate. This transition led to two ML models focused on PII detection and user (conversational) behavior. Thus, our first Illuminate data science-based features were announced and shown at LegalWeek 2022.
Post LegalWeek of that year, we began to explore more product capabilities with our partner IBM. One immediate area of improvement allowed us to tap into IBM’s Watson Discovery and leverage their existing PII detection engine. We then continued adding to our ML capabilities by implementing the categorization of data content thereby helping our clients understand what users were actually discussing within large conversational data sets.
