News You Can Use

Edition 23 · 1st - 14th Aug 2025

News You Can Use

Deep Dives

Three stories worth sitting with

GPT-5 Coverage - smarter, faster, but not perfect (Mollick | Harvey | Legora | Gary Marcus)

Mollick|Harvey|Legora|Gary Marcus

What
The launch of GPT-5 combines better reasoning, quicker output, and handles more complex tasks. Harvey and Legora (amongst others) have already integrated GPT-5 to improve their products. Harvey showed sharper drafting and improved performance on their BigLaw Bench evaluation suite. However, AI critic Gary Marcus described the model as overhyped and underwhelming.
So what
As we continue testing models for AGPT, we can explore GPT-5's capabilities to see if it enhances AGPT's accuracy, speed and usefulness. Initial tests show that GPT-5 performs better on our DD benchmark.

McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2025

McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2025

What
McKinsey identifies 13 frontier tech trends set to transform industries. Key themes include the rise of agentic AI, advances in application-specific semiconductors, the scaling of autonomous systems, and deeper human-machine collaboration.
So what
The trends support our approach to experiment with multi-step AI workflows across different teams. Tools such as Copilot, or Microsoft apps like Power Automate are increasingly vital to our build and testing of agentic workflows.

OpenAI x BBVA Collaboration

OpenAI x BBVA Collaboration

What
BBVA, one of Europe's largest banks, announced its collaboration with OpenAI to roll out GPT-5 across the organisation, deploying over 11,000 licenses. Early results show productivity gains, cutting tasks from weeks to hours and saving users three hours per week on average.
So what
A major financial institution adopting GPT-5 at scale highlights the potential impact of next-generation AI in professional services. This validates our investment in AGPT and our tech stack.

Worth Reading

Everything else worth a click

McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2025 (PDF)

[Internal AG resource] McKinsey's 13 frontier tech trends, led by agentic AI, application-specific silicon, scaled autonomy and deeper human-machine collaboration. Useful backdrop for firm-wide tech strategy discussions.

Harvey - The Future of Legal Technology

Harvey's long-form view of where legal tech is going: hybrid build-plus-buy, new business models, AI-native competitors, and pricing reform. Worth a read even if you take Harvey's self-interest into account.

Jordan Furlong - What Are Lawyers For?

Furlong argues lawyers have a commercial role and a civic role - to "bring the law to life" and defend the rule of law. Pointed in the current political environment.

Alex Su - Legal AI's Next Breakout

Argues the technology is ready but distribution is the real problem. The channel that will scale legal AI needs to be embedded in the work, trusted by senior buyers, and operationally mature - pointing toward ALSPs.

Building for Production: Generative AI Playbook (PDF)

[Internal AG resource] Playbook on the engineering and operational work required to move GenAI features from demo to production. Useful reference for any internal build effort.

GPT-5 Coverage

Harvey - Building a Legal Coworker with GPT-5

Harvey on how GPT-5 unlocks a "legal coworker" that plans, reasons and executes full workflows rather than one-shot tasks. Vendor framing but useful to see what they're building on top.

Prompting Science Report 3 (PDF)

[Internal AG resource] Third instalment of the Prompting Science Report covering structured testing of prompt techniques. Useful empirical grounding for any prompt library or training session.

Anthropic - 1M Context Window

Claude Sonnet gets a 1M-token context window. Matters specifically for long-document legal tasks like full-bundle review, deal data rooms, and multi-volume regulatory filings.