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When the IRS changes a lease regulation, compliance protocol calls for review of every lease to which a company is a party. Until recently this always meant lots of professionals reading lots of pages for a long time – slow, costly, and error-prone.

Now – employing a tiny percentage of the professionals required for traditional manual review – EY, the Big 4 firm automates this review with an artificial intelligence-based system “three times more consistent and twice as efficient as previous humans-only teams” — and they do it for only a fraction of the cost.

Each of the other Big 4 firms has implemented its own artificial intelligence-based systems to complete faster, cheaper, and more accurately various labor-intensive tasks that have historically been staples of accounting practices: KPMG, Deloitte, and PwC.

But business lawyers are staying away in droves from this sort of labor-saving technology.

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In 2009 the Mayo Clinic’s cardiac surgeons asked for two more operating rooms to meet growing demand for open-heart surgery, according to a June 2017 story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required)

“No” – replied the Mayo Clinic’s CEO.

Then he asked them to redesign every aspect of heart surgery to find at least 20% in cost cuts.

Externally, he saw a perfect storm of reduced revenue and increased costs driven by an aging population. Internally – responding to the CEO’s mandate – his chief of cardiovascular surgery found disparities of up to 2X in average cost per operation (from $55,000 to $110,000) — “too much variability”.

This sparked changes in surgeon scheduling, new physician-developed protocols that empowered nurses to streamline post-operative care, and a 50% reduction in average operating room turnover times between surgeries. The clinic cited “millions of dollars” in savings, though it declined to say if it met the 20% target.

The clinic did go on the record to claim $900 million in savings over the past five years from such re-engineering projects.

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