By Rob Hewett
Following news of its rebrand from ContractPodAi to Leah at the start of the year, this week (10th February) Leah and PwC UK last week announced a new partnership, deepening their relationship that started in March 2024. The partnership will support Leah’s expansion out of legal into other business areas such as HR and finance. PwC UK will work with Leah to help clients design processes and workflows for agentic AI.
The release of Leah’s Agentic OS combined with PwC UK’s “deep domain expertise” in client transformation consultancy, aims to offer an AI-enabled enterprise solution to clients. James Thomas, chief AI officer at Leah, told Legal IT Insider: “[Leah’s] Agentic OS is not a single agent; it has multiple agents that create deterministic and probabilistic enterprise workflows across multiple business functions.” Prasun Shah, AI Leader at PwC Consulting UK, added that: “[Leah’s technology] helps us to move horizontally out of one vertical into other verticals across the enterprise.”
Referring to the recent news of Anthropic’s legal plug-in, which some commentators expect will lead to the demise of domain-specific legal tech, Thomas says: “The recent shocks to the legal landscape have vindicated, in many ways, the path we chose a while ago.”
Through setting up a collaborative Agentic Enterprise Innovation Lab at one of PwC’s delivery centres in South Africa, Leah and PwC UK have been able to speed up the joint development the Agentic OS over the last six months. Shah comments: “We are building up a team who are able to help consult with our clients on Leah’s technology, alongside our expertise in the transformation of business operating models.”
Limited customer trials are already underway. Shah says Leah’s technology can be applied “like Lego blocks” to other enterprise areas, like HR or finance. As Thomas explains: “We can actually begin to re-engineer entire processes, because you’re no longer limited by a person having to go in and do something […] you can deploy multiple agents within any kind of process or workflow, and they can execute and synthesise the data.”
How will this higher degree of automation impact the workforce? Both Shah and Thomas predict that “there will be a re-calibration […] movement from individual-led linear task-based processes to a business outcome led view of the world.” The core human skills and higher value work such as client interaction will likely become an organisation’s competitive advantage as enterprise AI proliferates further.
The post Leah and PwC UK launch agentic AI partnership – We speak to their AI heads appeared first on Legal IT Insider.