Publication
Global rules on foreign direct investment (FDI)
Cross-border acquisitions and investments increasingly trigger foreign direct investment (FDI) screening requirements.
Global | Publication | January 2020
In the 1990s and 2000s, as everything from banking to buying books moved online, “brick and mortar” businesses were suddenly required to have an online presence and to design new business processes to accommodate the new online world. Through a practice called business process engineering (BPE), banks had to design online services and appropriate authentication procedures, retailers designed online payment processes, and businesses in many sectors implemented processes for back office activities (such as invoicing and accounts payable) and customer-facing activities (such as responding to queries and complaints).
The generation of new online businesses that flourished during this period enjoyed a natural advantage in this environment. Their business processes had been engineered from the start for the online world, whereas the established players often ran their old pre-internet processes and the new online processes in parallel. Over time, through business process reengineering (BPR), these parallel processes were redesigned so that the brick and mortar businesses could compete in the new environment.
The revolution in AI poses a similar challenge today to that posed by the internet revolution. AI will be able to drive efficiencies through further labour arbitrage and by generating and allowing customers to react to richer insights into their business processes. A new wave of BPE will create processes centred around AI, and no doubt in time, old processes will need to redesigned through BPR.
In almost every outsourcing that we have seen over the past two or three years, the transformation plan includes the deployment of automation and AI to drive efficiency. Rules-based automation has been around for some time (it is not the focus of this article), but the autonomous nature of AI and the specific requirements for training an AI solution present a new set of challenges for the outsourcing practitioner.
The answer to that apparently simple question is somewhat complex. This article addresses the question by: (1) looking at the ways in which outsourcing agreements may need to be redesigned for the deployment of AI, whether one is looking to amend an existing outsourcing agreement through change control or contracting for an entirely new outsourcing; and (2) focusing on the impact of AI on a few key provisions in outsourcing agreements:
AI will necessarily affect other provisions in the agreement (for example, the data protection provisions), with consequences in some sectors more so than in others (for example, regulated outsourcings in the financial services sector). More information on these topics can be found on our Inside Tech Law blog. This article will then consider the downstream impact of AI within an outsourcing context on the customer’s other third-party vendors, and will conclude with some observations on contracting for disruptive technologies (such as AI) more generally.
The full article was published by educational charity the Society for Computers and Law (SCL).
Publication
Cross-border acquisitions and investments increasingly trigger foreign direct investment (FDI) screening requirements.
Publication
On February 2, 2024, the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union confirmed that the Committee of Permanent Representatives had signed the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Regulation, referred to as the AI Act. Approval by the EU Parliament followed on 13 March 2024, and the AI Act is likely to appear in the EU’s Official Journal around May 2024. The AI Act aims to establish a stringent legal framework governing the development, marketing, and utilisation of artificial intelligence within the region, thereby marking a significant advancement in the regulation of this burgeoning domain.
Publication
The private credit market and direct lending have grown and diversified immensely in the past decade, offering alternative sources and terms of debt compared to those historically provided by the syndicated leveraged loan and public issuance markets. Consequently, they are fast becoming pivotal components in the capital ecosystem, so much so that the Bank of England consider that the private credit market is currently responsible for approximately $1.8 trillion of debt issuance, which is four times its size in 2015. This growth has been particularly pronounced in Europe and the US but there has also been significant activity in Asia.
Subscribe and stay up to date with the latest legal news, information and events . . .
© Norton Rose Fulbright LLP 2023