TMT overview
The legal implications of new technologies have been making headlines recently, with a group of more than 100 specialists in robotics submitting an open letter to the United Nations urging a ban on the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in weapon systems. But on the commercial side the change capturing lawyers’ attention is not cutting-edge tech but the creeping maturity of IT systems that have been around for years. As Louise Pentland, general counsel of PayPal, comments: ‘The disruptive trends that are likely to shape business in the coming months are existing technologies becoming more capable.’
One of the best examples of a disruptive trend developing from technology that most businesses are already familiar with is the sudden ubiquity of cloud computing. Although moving business processes to the cloud is technologically passé – remote processing through application service providers (ASPs) has been around for nearly 20 years – internet speeds were, until recently, too slow to allow for anything beyond simple processes to be migrated. Now it is entering the mainstream. In early June 2017 Lloyds Bank finally signed its long-planned outsourcing contract with IBM, a £1.3bn deal that will see a large number of staff, along with core business processes, move over to IBM. Many large organisations are likely to follow.
