Agents, Lawyers, and LLMs

Aatish Nayak, head of product at Harvey, sits down with a16z partner Kimberly Tan to share his experience building AI products for enterprises — including the legal profession — and how to address areas like UX, trust, and customer engagement. Importantly, Aatish explains, industries like law don't need AGI or even the latest and greatest models; they need products that augment their existing workflows so they can better serve clients and still make it home for dinner. Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence, including articles, projects, and more podcasts here - https://a16z.com/ai/ 00:26 - Intro 01:04 - What exactly does Harvey do? 01:26 - Specific use cases for legal and professional services 02:49 - Selling to law firms and professional services 06:33 - Labor replacement or co-pilot model? 08:09 - What does the agentic work-flow actually look like? 09:39 - How do law firms think about charging? Business model and pricing 10:53 - UI / UX - How enterprises meaningfully get value out of AI products and services 12:37 - Expanding into other industries, beyond legal and professional services 15:03 - What do you mean when you say, ‘custom models’? 16:00 - Trust and data security 18:41 - What is your philosophy around building applied AI products? 19:47 - What is an AI native UX 20:44 - What is the actual UI? 22:14 - What does it look like in practice for lawyers? 23:35 - Do we know what the best AI native UI/UX experience is? 25:53 - Let’s talk about the infrastructure under the hood 27:10 - How easy is it to swap a model? 27:53 - Evaluation 31:23 - What are your thoughts on the new Open AI reasoning models? 32:40 - How are you defining ‘unit of work being done’? 33:57 - Do you want to build your own foundation model? 34:38 - Do you view foundation models as competitors? 36:42 - AI zeitgeist vs. enterprise 39:19 - How do business and staffing models need to adapt? 40:43 - Predictions for the future / Finding Value / ROI