Adidas rolls out AI legal chatbot for staff guidance

Adidas has deployed Josef's AI question-and-answer tool to help staff access legal and compliance guidance across its workforce of more than 65,000 employees.

Katherine Roseveare, General Counsel for Global Functions, Global Operations and Legal Solutions at Adidas, said the rollout was a response to what she called "infobesity" in large organisations, where legal teams produce extensive policy documents that employees do not read.

She said legal teams often struggle to turn detailed internal policies into guidance that workers will actually use. The problem is not a lack of material, but low engagement with traditional formats such as intranet pages, FAQs and policy documents.

"The biggest users of Word in the whole business are the legal team. Lawyers love producing documents, policies, frameworks. But nobody wants to read those anymore," Roseveare said.

That view shaped Adidas' decision to adopt a chatbot-style interface for legal and compliance questions. Roseveare said the company wanted a format that matched how employees communicate and search for information in day-to-day work.

The first area selected for the tool was compliance, launched alongside a new code of conduct. The legal team reviewed internal knowledge libraries and identified subjects where an AI-based question-and-answer system could be used while still meeting the department's requirements for reliability and control over responses.

Accuracy was a central concern because of the sensitivity of compliance matters. Adidas compared Josef with other internal options, including Microsoft Copilot and large language model application programming interfaces, before choosing its approach.

"I don't want to see a hallucination, thank you very much. This is too delicate a topic. I want people to be able to come and have certainty in the answers. We have to. It's too risky," Roseveare said.

The use of AI for internal legal guidance points to a wider issue for large multinational companies. Legal departments are expected to support staff across multiple countries, languages and business functions, but are often limited by the reach of one-to-one advice and static document libraries.

Josef, which develops legal automation and AI tools, has worked with Adidas over the past year on the deployment. Sam Flynn, Co-Founder at Josef, said one of the main challenges for legal leaders is how to advise a large business consistently without relying solely on direct interaction with lawyers.

He said the move to self-service tools also revealed an effect that had not been fully anticipated at the outset. Once employees could ask questions through a system rather than to a person, they began raising issues they might otherwise have kept to themselves.

Those included questions about gifts, conduct and other situations that may seem straightforward to lawyers but can feel awkward or risky for employees to raise directly. For legal teams, those unseen questions can provide another source of information about where staff uncertainty lies and where training materials may be falling short.

"There's actually a hidden benefit. People use the chatbot when they're asking questions they're too embarrassed to ask a human," Roseveare said.

She added that the tool has also helped employees who are not working in their first language. Instead of drafting a carefully worded email or searching through dense internal documents, staff can ask questions in natural language and reach an answer more quickly.

The data generated through those interactions has also given Adidas' legal team a clearer picture of what staff are thinking about. That has implications not only for answering individual questions, but also for shaping compliance training and identifying weak points in existing communication materials.

"It really helps us with the questions we never see. It helps us analyse whether our training materials are good enough, what focus areas we should pick up, and generally what's in people's minds," Roseveare said.

Change management

Roseveare said the success of legal technology projects depends more on organisational change management than on the software alone. Teams need to pay attention to how employees actually use new systems, especially in environments where legal functions have traditionally relied on documents, email and manual guidance.

Her approach draws on what she described as two rules for surviving legal work: assume nothing and embrace the chaos. In practice, that means testing whether a tool fits existing working habits and whether sceptical users can be won over once they see a practical benefit.

She illustrated that point with an earlier DocuSign rollout, in which one initially resistant user later became a strong supporter. The phrase that emerged from that episode has since become an internal benchmark for successful implementation.

"Now every time we do something, we say we are aiming for super duper wow wow. Who is our super duper wow wow person that we need to find in the group and bring along on that journey?" Roseveare said.

For Adidas, the legal AI project is part of a broader effort to make internal guidance easier to access across a global workforce while keeping tight oversight of the answers being delivered.

"If you want it to stick, you really have to invest in change management. It doesn't matter which tool it is," Roseveare said.