The big theme that came up at CLOC’s CGI 2026 in Chicago this year, in session after session and conversation after conversation: how people behave. Yes, there were conversations about AI and technology, but in numerous sessions, speakers and attendees brought up how important the human element is in successful enterprise AI adoption. It’s not enough to understand the technology. You need to understand how people behave, too.
Here are the three most important—and human-centric—takeaways from CLOC this year.
Takeaway 1: You are not running behind in AI. No one is. Numerous speakers, from companies large and small, noted that the key to creating successful AI projects was to start with a pilot, tightly define its scope, get buy-in from the relevant stakeholders, and document everything. These specific processes are critical to make sure the initiative actually works. Alexander Shusterman, Staff Technical Program Manager, CLO AI, and Carolyn Wakulchik
Manager, CLO Operations, both at Uber, said in their session, "Scope the risk area. What do you care about the most? If you ask everybody, they're going to tell you they want the sun, moon, and stars in the solution, and that is a surefire way to make sure that it doesn't work correctly. Better to start small, focus, and then scale and increase over time. The goal is to see if it works, and if not, you move on to the next thing, and that's okay."
Takeaway 2: Because of their knowledge of people and systems, legal ops is now considered the center of tech innovation in the entire business. Many speakers talked about legal being considered a support function and a cost center in the past, but thanks to the explosion of AI-powered legal technology and knowledge of how to create systems that work, legal ops is now actually at the forefront of innovation. Alex Gao, Senior Director of Legal Operations at Hilton, noted in her session that her GC told her that all of the legal team’s objectives were about supporting other business functions, except for the technology implementation led by the legal operations team. This led to a business-wide shift in how the legal team was perceived: “We truly shape the perception and are the driver in legal innovation and transformation.”
Takeaway 3: The value center in legal departments has shifted. When AI can do the day-to-day execution work of document drafting and review, the value lawyers provide is less in creating items and more in providing good counsel. Mary O’Carroll, the CEO of LECG, put it very plainly in her session: “We're paying more for judgment. We're paying less for execution." That means legal’s relationship with the business is changing to an enablement role, where legal collects insights from the business and uses them to proactively measure and manage risk.
So many people at CLOC told me—and said on stage—that technology’s capabilities were growing faster than humans’ ability to process it. It’s therefore not surprising that AI adoption is so profoundly influenced by how humans manage change. More than one speaker commented that technology isn’t a virtue in itself; it’s what you do with it that matters. What’s clear is that legal ops departments are doing the hard work of turning AI's potential into repeatable practice, and that this capability will only develop in the coming months.
