Barry Phillips (CEO) BEM founded Legal Island in 1998. Since then, the company has become the leading workplace compliance training company in the island of Ireland. He was awarded a British Empire Medal in the New Year’s Honours List 2020 for services to employment and equality.
Barry is a qualified barrister, coach and meditator and a regular speaker both here and abroad. He also volunteers as mentor to aspiring law students on the Migrant Leaders Programme.
Barry is an author, releasing his latest book titled 'Mastering Small Business Employee Engagement: 30 Quick Wins & HR Hacks from an IIP Platinum Employer' in 2020 along with Legal Island MD Jayne Gallagher.
Barry has worked at the European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights and the International Labour Organisation in Geneva before qualifying as a lawyer in 1993.
He has travelled extensively and lived in a total of eight different countries considering himself to be a global citizen first, a European second and British/Irish citizen last of all. His guiding mantra in life is “Never react but respond. Get curious not furious.”
Barry is an Ironman and lists Russian language and wild camping as his favourite pastimes.
This week, Barry Phillips, argues that the era of free GenAI use is coming to an end meaning big and difficult choices ahead for employers.
Transcript:
Hello Humans!
And welcome to the podcast that aims to summarise each week in five minutes or less a key AI issue relevant to the world of HR.
This week we’re looking at something we think HR teams need to get serious about and quickly too.
For the last couple of years, AI has felt free. A bit like the office tea bags, everyone’s using it, nobody’s tracking it, and somehow the supply keeps appearing.
But that phase is ending. We’re hearing that around 81% of professionals are using AI. That’s according to a survey by Wharton Business School published at the end of last year.
That sounds huge and it is. But let’s not kid ourselves: using AI sometimes is not the same as using it daily and well, and it’s definitely not the same as employers being in control of it.
In January of this year, we surveyed 40 employers, and over half admitted they had no idea which LLM their staff were using. No idea. That’s not a strategy. That’s the Wild West.
So, our view here at Legal Island is that many organisations still haven’t chosen their main, go-to LLM for most or all of their workforce.
And now they need to. Because the big AI companies are losing huge amounts of money building these tools. At some point, business users are going to pay for all that development.
And that point could be very soon. You can already see it happening.
The gap between free ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus keeps getting bigger. Free is fine for dabbling. But if you want staff to do high-quality work consistently, the paid version is where the true value is.
And that’s $20 per person, per month.
So AI is no longer just “something clever staff are trying out”. It’s becoming a budget decision. Now, the other big contender is Microsoft 365 Copilot.
And this is where HR and compliance teams tend to lean in. Because even if Copilot isn’t always seen as the strongest tool on pure performance, many employers prefer it for one simple reason: governance. It sits inside the Microsoft environment, with the security and compliance controls they already use. And that matters when your teams are handling grievances, disciplinaries, investigations, restructuring plans. In other words, the kind of material you absolutely do not want floating around in random tools.
But Copilot isn’t cheap either. For a business, it’s another licence cost on top of Microsoft 365. For a 25-person team like we have at Legal Island, you’re into thousands a year. And once you roll it out, train everyone, and build processes around it, you’re not likely to switch quickly, even if prices go up later. And one more thing: this is no longer just ChatGPT versus Copilot.
Models by Anthropic are now a serious option , particularly for people doing heavy writing and knowledge work. Claude 4.6 released just recently, is in the view of many experts the leading LLM right now for typical workplace use cases. Gemini Pro is in the mix too and lets not forget good old Perplexity for research tasks. So it’s not a two-horse race anymore. It’s a proper field of good contenders. Place your bets please.
Conclusion
The real HR question is no longer “Are our staff using AI?”. They already are. The question is: which tool are we backing, what are the rules, and what are we willing to pay? The free trial era is ending. The organisations that choose carefully and well now will get the productivity gains. The ones that don’t will just get the invoices.
Bye for now!
