Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis

As part of our Technology Marathon webinar series, partners Mike Pierides and Steven Stone recently discussed financial regulators’ increasing focus on artificial intelligence (AI).

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to total more than $5 trillion in 2024, with 10% year-on-year growth of spending on data center systems, according to recent analysis from Gartner. The increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions is driving demand for technology infrastructure in order to meet greater data storage and network infrastructure requirements and more compute-intensive workloads.

Beginning January 17, 2025, the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) will require financial entities to maintain and submit to EU regulators a comprehensive register of their contractual arrangements with third-party information and communication technology (ICT) service providers. Financial entities are being given the opportunity to sign up for a voluntary reporting exercise by May 31, 2024, running between July and August 2024, to help them prepare for one of the most challenging aspects of implementing DORA.

We recently published a report based on our four-part series on Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis, in which we consider a number of conundrums facing companies looking to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) as part of their outsourcing arrangements. As outsourcing remains a key tool through which companies can streamline operations, cut costs, and access specialized expertise, the explosive advancements in AI and related technologies have introduced new and exciting opportunities and complexities for companies in implementing and maintaining outsourcing relationships.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently published an update paper outlining its concerns with artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models (FMs). Market players in this space should remain mindful of the CMA’s growing interest as the regulator continues its dedicated program to consider the impact of FMs on markets throughout 2024, with a further update anticipated in August.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has published data showing that banks are increasingly using third-party providers to support their critical functions. However, more than 10% of outsourcing contracts covering critical functions are not compliant with the relevant regulations. During a key year for EU financial institutions and their critical service providers—with implementation projects for the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) well underway—the ECB signals that outsourcing and resiliency, particularly risks associated with cloud outsourcing and concentration risks, will be a top priority on its supervisory agenda.

It is no secret that usage of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continues to expand at a rapid pace. In fact, Flexera’s 2023 Tech Spend Pulse, which is based on a survey of 506 information technology executives across the world, found that investments in AI technologies are surging to a 68% planned increase in use. That figure was the highest of all technologies in the survey.

Morgan Lewis partners Christopher C. Archer, Anastasia Dergacheva, and J. Daniel Skees as well as associate Arjun Prasad Ramadevanahalli will discuss developments and trends in cybersecurity and digital transformation for the energy industry on Wednesday, November 29.

Deloitte has issued a biennial report that identifies trends that are impacting customer/client contact center operations. The respondents surveyed by Deloitte represented both internal- and external-facing contact centers. This blog post summarizes some key trends outlined in the report.

While the regulatory landscape around artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, navigating contractual arrangements and apportioning risk for the use of AI may seem like stepping into the unknown. In this blog post, we consider how a few familiar concepts within commercial contracts may be applied to the provision and use of AI tools as part of services.