Artificial intelligence qualification helps law firm implement AI-powered business systems

Agnostic programme for AI

The programme, however, is not limited to customers from the legal sector, and has been purposefully designed to cover AI technology more broadly rather than just the Rainbird platform itself.

“In terms of our focus, we do a lot of work in financial and legal services and those kind of quite regulated spaces,” said Ben Taylor, Rainbird’s CEO. “But our technology is sector and use case agnostic, it can be used for anything from designing healthcare programmes to underwriting and insurance, so we wanted to build an AI training program that didn’t focus on any one particular sector.”

The programme is structured into three stages of learning, starting broadly and becoming more refined and tailored as a student progresses through each.

The first stage is the Foundation Certificate, which as an entry-level qualification aims to give users a basic knowledge of how AI works and its potential uses. This is then followed by the Professional Certificate and the Architect Certificate.

“In terms of why this particular foundation curriculum has been kept quite broad, we thought it was important that people, to really benefit from the technology, understand where it sits in the context of everything else that’s going on,” said Taylor.

“There’s a lot of noise in this market and what we’re trying to do is cut through some of that noise and explain what AI really is and where the applications for the technologies really are – whether that’s Rainbird or something else.”

Taylor added that this particular structure came from working with clients to understand what successful AI implementation looks like.

“Looking at how you build on skills to maximise the chances of success, what we found was that you need to have a broad number of people who understand the stakes,” he said.

“So imagine you’ve trained a team of 20 people to foundation level, you might take 10 people through professional level who are all going to work together to build something, but are then able to talk about what they built with the wider group because everybody’s been trained at a foundation level.”

In terms of getting on the programme, a customer will usually require sponsorship from an organisation, something Taylor believes is important because it gives the course a more practical edge focused on “building real solutions to real problems”.

“The more people who are formally qualified in the foundations and principles of human-down AI development whose expertise, knowledge and judgement processes we’re trying to replicate, the more opportunity there is to make automated decision-making use cases smarter and customer experiences smoother,” said James Duez, executive chairman at Rainbird.

“With this training, customers can quickly become self-sufficient and empowered to explore different automation use cases across their business.” 

So far, 243 people have been through the programme, receiving at least the foundation-level training.

Rainbird have also expressed interest in partnering with universities and other research organisations, particularly at the lowest foundational level, to teach ordinary students the basics of AI technology, although nothing concrete has been laid out as of yet.