Noerr Outsourcing Day – Automation/Intelligent Systems Challenge the Outsourcing Industry

The future issue “Industry 4.0” also represents new challenges to the outsourcing industry. The IT lawyer Prof. Peter Bräutigam sees a strong trend towards replacing work so far performed by humans with new technologies by robotics/automation. Approx. 100 experts from home and abroad discussed the associated consequences for the industry at this year’s Outsourcing Day of the law firm Noerr.

When outsourcing typical back office work, business process providers even today often rely on automated IT-driven processes. “With the use of artificial intelligence and automation, outsourcing as a whole faces a revolution”, said Noerr partner Peter Bräutigam. According to him, the intelligent factory is becoming reality by the networking of production processes. This also massively changes the role of IT and IT outsourcing.

“Legally too, we are entering absolutely new territory”, emphasised Bräutigam. He said that the learning ability of intelligent systems – and the associated unpredictability for the customer – could push fundamental civil law concepts to their limits and throw up new liability issues. The question arises, for example, whether decisions made by intelligent systems could at all constitute a declaration of intent of the user. Bräutigam also pointed out another question, namely whether the customer is responsible for a decision of intelligent software or whether the programmer must accept responsibility.

After all, false assessments due to big data analyses in claims have raised new liability questions already in the past. “If learned behaviour of intelligent products is not foreseeable for the user, he cannot be accused of fault, i.e. he has no liability at first sight”, said Bräutigam. He said it is thinkable for the legislator to introduce strict liability based on risk as in traffic law, i.e. the user is liable without fault but with an upper limit to the amount of compensation.  

Other issues at the Noerr Outsourcing Day included outsourcing trends in banking, the next generation outsourcing from the point of view of IT, employment and tax law, IT security and cloud computing.