MIT lightning strike!

The new Massachusetts Institute of Technology study indicating that the current generation of AI "possess the power to replace 11.7% of the American labor force, representing $1.2 trillion in annual wages across such sectors as finance, health care and professional services," is catching people's attention! In his post today, Michael Gennaro calls the study "groundbreaking." In his post, Ryan McKeen says the MIT study should "terrify every law firm leader" (if you've "been treating AI like a fancy spell-checker" that is). The study seems to fly in the face of the other posts in my PinHawk feeds about the failure of regular and agentic AI projects and the general failure to achieve an ROI on most projects. I haven't yet had time to examine the 21-page MIT report (The Iceberg Index: Measuring Workforce Exposure in the AI Economy) but I am wondering what kind of work is so replaceable? And is it replaceable at an equal or lower cost? Ryan is blunt with his beliefs, "Let me be direct: no job in legal is safe. Not associates. Not partners. Not paralegals. Not staff. The question is not whether your role will be affected. The question is whether you will be the one directing the transformation or the one being transformed out of existence." Michael is much more measured in his response, writing, "While the study forecasts that wrenching changes loom for swaths of the American workforce, it does not suggest wholesale elimination of professions. Rather, the research points to specific types of jobs within professions as being most vulnerable to displacement, with routine positions in HR, logistics, finance and office administration leading the way." Read the report and drop me a line as to what you think the impact in legal will be. Read more at:
Corporate Counsel: AI Already Capable of Replacing 12% of US Workforce, Seminal MIT Study Finds
JD SUPRA: Don't Lie: No Legal Job Is Safe From AI.

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Prognosticator of all prognosticators?

I think AI impacting ANYTHING in 2026 is a pretty safe prediction. What kind of impact, positive or negative and to what degree is what would set apart the true prognosticators. Stephanie Simone draws from the research from Dimension Market Research which predicts "the AI-driven knowledge management system market is expected to grow by $251.2 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.7% from 2025 to 2034." The top trends identified are:
Customer support and self-service portals
Enterprise knowledge sharing and collaboration
Regulatory compliance and risk management
Accelerated Research and Development (R&D)
Again, not very risky or bold predictions in my opinion. Read more at KMWorld: Leaders predict AI to continue permeating all aspects of KM in 2026

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Small words->Big impacts

I find it fascinating how some trials come down to the definition of one word. We've had cases where the definitions of "sandwich," "loitering," "and," and "is" were all put to the test. It makes your head spin at times. Now with the suit against OpenAI, we can apparently add "non-use" to that word list. I love the way Ashley Belanger ended her post, writing, "In a footnote, Wang called out OpenAI for 'bizarrely' citing an Anthropic ruling that 'grossly' misrepresented Judge William Alsup's decision by claiming that he found that 'downloading pirated copies of books is lawful as long as they are subsequently used for training an LLM.'" Almost sounds like someone improperly used genAI doesn't it? Read more at ars technica: OpenAI desperate to avoid explaining why it deleted pirated book datasets

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Jeffrey Brandt, Editor

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