NEW: Project update now available under Reports.
The aim of this research is to investigate any uses of AI in corporate insolvency. Identification of whether AI could be used to support resolution of corporate insolvency proceedings is a critical step towards modernising the insolvency regime, promoting innovation, improving its resilience, as well as supporting a sustainable business ecosystem and economy. The current approach to the sparse discourse on the benefits and risks of technological transformation in corporate insolvency, though helpful, is limited to anecdotal and doctrinal postulations. This contrasts with a body of accessible empirical data that indicate high costs and other operational inefficiencies in the current insolvency regime.
Recent legislative and policy interventions in insolvency law are driven by empirical data and multi- stakeholder consultations. Therefore, the research findings will be based on a multi-stakeholder driven experiment, which will provide empirical evidence of whether there are AI-adaptable insolvency tasks, existence or otherwise of AI tools for any such tasks, and outcomes (including costs and risks) where AI could be used to support any identified tasks.
Video credit: BBC News
This exploratory-interdisciplinary research is exploring whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) has capabilities to support the delivery of complex insolvency tasks with optimal outcomes. But what is AI?
In phase I, we use a questionnaire to identify key tasks that impact the resolution of corporate insolvency proceedings, whether or not any of such tasks could be supported by AI, and whether there are existing or buildable AI tools to support any AI-adaptable tasks.
The quantitative study into the role of AI in corporate insolvency proceedings aims to (a) distil key corporate insolvency tasks that might be supported by AI, (b) identify existing AI tools that might support such tasks, and (c) conduct a design experiment applying such tools to tasks in randomly selected corporate insolvency cases that have been completed to present a comparative illustration of actual and AI-applied insolvency outcomes. The quantitative study will sample circa 500 completed insolvency cases.
Details about phase 3 will be updated in due course.
The UK Government Insolvency Service - c/o Hamish Hore, Head of Research & Policy Analysis
Inga West - Counsel, Ashurst
Christina Fitzgerald - Director, Isadore Goldman and former president, R3
Professor Rebecca Parry - Professor, Nottingham Trent University
Thomas Wood - Director, Fast Data Science