At Frontier, keeping our technical expertise sharp is central to what we do. General purpose AI has developed rapidly, and like many of our clients, we have been working to understand its potential applications, risks and benefits.

Since the summer of 2023, our multi-disciplinary team of data scientists, economists and IT specialists have been developing a tool that harnesses the power of machine learning and generative AI to make our jurisprudence searches more efficient and effective. We have followed an agile software development approach; starting small, iterating quickly, testing with experts in the firm and learning from our mistakes.

This is a big week for our team. We are releasing the first version of AMI (Assisted Merger Intelligence) internally across Frontier. AMI allows our teams to:

• Search the entire history of UK merger competition decision reports (CMA, CC & OFT) using natural language queries;
• Filter the reports by sectors, companies involved, years, outcome of the investigation and common economic concepts e.g. barriers to entry;
• Flex between more specific keyword searching and more open semantic searches; and
• Generate summaries of the key paragraphs relevant to the search.

AMI exploits the full range of capabilities provided by large language models: classification, information retrieval and summarisation.

We are excited by AMI but we are not stopping here. We are now working to fine-tune and incorporate the latest language models to further improve the searches and user experience. Over the coming weeks, we aim to release AMI to a small group of our clients to get further feedback.

Getting to grips with AI and building a tool like AMI delivers additional benefits. Our data scientists are building an AI expertise that we are deploying on client projects to automate the classification of text documents and to speed up literature reviews.

By getting our hands dirty with generative AI, we are developing a deep, technical understanding of the strengths and risks of these technologies – something one cannot get from reading research papers and news articles. This expertise now feeds directly into our economic analysis of the emerging AI market for our clients.

If you are interested in learning more about AMI and our work with generative AI, please get in touch at media@frontier-economics.com or call +44 (0) 20 7031 7000.