AI

The bottleneck in regulated work has never been generation. It is review. The most useful AI products of 2026 are the ones quietly compressing the review cycle in legal, finance, and pharma.

Anthropic shipped Claude into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook in May 2026 and overtook OpenAI in enterprise share. Microsoft 365 is now the platform legal AI runs on.

The 12-page brief was a coordination tax for an era when ads cost real money to produce. In May 2026, 50 variants cost a coffee. The scarcity has moved.

Cursor's share of GitHub commits doubled in a month. The lesson generalizes: vertical AI inside the user's tool keeps beating horizontal AI in a browser tab.

May 2026 was the month AI moved into Word for real. The narrative says every legal workflow goes back into the document. It is half right.

Hallucinations are an annoyance in a chatbot. In a regulated ad, they are a regulatory event. What the 2026 wave of generative tools is doing about it, and what is still hard.

Vision language models now read scanned title packages with accuracy that rivals dedicated OCR. Here's what that shift means for Quebec title review and the hybrid pipeline inside Cleardeal.

Best practices like one variable at a time and 200 conversions per arm assumed variants were scarce. They are no longer scarce. The math of marketing experimentation is changing under our feet.

May 2026's Microsoft 365 wave puts Claude inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 makes Graph-driven email intake a sanctioned pattern. The inbox is now the front door.

U.S. title underwriters spent 2026 shipping AI products, not pilots. The Canadian closing market, with notaries and lawyers in the middle, will absorb that shift on a different timeline.

Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ were sold as let the AI do everything. Two years in, advertisers are pulling budget back to tools that give them visibility and control.

Bill C-27 died on prorogation in January 2025. Sixteen months later, Canada still has no federal AI law. The provinces moved in, and any future federal text will land on top of the patchwork.

A practical roundup of the AI tools small Canadian firms are actually running in 2026 for drafting, research, intake, and entity work. With prices, gotchas, and what is missing.

Engineering encoded its style guides into linters years ago. Compliance teams are doing the same with policy-as-code, and the 2026 wave of generative AI tools is reading those policies at generation time.

Quebec's Law 25 finished rolling out in September 2024. By May 2026 the CAI has teeth, and AI tools pull solo firms across three obligations most have not documented.

Title review is the obvious AI target in real estate, but it is only one part of pre-closing diligence. Zoning, environmental, condo declarations, surveys: the rest of the file is next.

Harvey, Hebbia, and the other US-hosted legal AI tools are excellent. They are also a Law 25 problem for Quebec firms and a professional-secrecy problem for the rest of Canada.