Are you ready for this? Joe Pirotta of ProSearch notes that, with agentic AI, when the playbook starts running itself can be a reality – today.

In his blog post titled (wait for it!) When the Playbook Starts Running Itself (available here), Joe references his last article, where he established three essential elements of discovery: find the facts that shape the matter, produce what must be produced, and protect what should not be exposed. The first element drives strategy, yet for twenty years we have often run it too late because the pipeline left us few better options. Agentic AI changes that sequence. It lets legal teams move more fact development to month zero, before the budget is spent and before case strategy hardens around an incomplete record.

The next challenge is determining what makes month-zero work dependable. Prompting can be part of that answer, but it is not the whole answer. A prompt is still a human firing off an instruction at a late stage, shaped by what they remembered to ask and limited by the corpus the pipeline already produced. The bigger move is encoding human judgment as a process: the department’s best questions, escalation points, validation steps, and matter-type lessons applied consistently across the discovery lifecycle. Prompting showed what was possible. Agents make it operational.

So, how does agentic AI turn playbooks into skills? And why isn’t the written playbook enough anymore? Find out here, it’s only one click! Unlike your eventual playbook, finding out doesn’t happen without clicking! 😉

So, what do you think? Do think we’re at a point of when the playbook starts running itself? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using DALL-E 3, using the term “robot lawyer wearing a suit stepping through a step diagram”.

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