Shreya Vajpei: “AI will almost become like electricity”

By Pablo Yannone Sancho, Journalist at GLTH

Curious, energetic, and passionate about legal transformation, Shreya Vajpei has taken a non-linear path to become an innovation advisor at the Global Legal Tech Hub. She started her career as a practicing lawyer in India but soon felt the need to explore beyond the courtroom. That led her to roles in marketing, business development, operations, and finally, digital transformation, all of them in law firms. “I sort of wanted to dabble in more things than just law”, she claims.

Today, working at one of India’s largest law firms, she drives innovation both internally and externally. She’s also building the Indian Legal Tech Network to strengthen the country’s legal tech ecosystem, an interest and a purpose that also drove her to join our Advisory Board. “The GLTH is not just supporting law firms or the buyer side of the story”, she says, “but also the startups. And that's really where a lot of innovation happens”.

A curious mind and global heart

Shreya’s interests reach far beyond law. As a child, she wanted to be an astronaut, and today, she thrives at the intersection of disciplines: “I can read about design or algorithms and apply it to legal work. That amalgamation is what keeps me going”. Maybe, that is why her daily mantra is “to keep learning something new every day”. Something that also could have a lot to do with her pleasure on travelling. Favorite place she’s visited? Venice: “It looks just like the pictures, almost unreal”, she claims.

Her way of seeing live mixes simplicity with a broad perspective that we can see melted in her definition of legaltech: “Any technology that touches a legal workflow”. It may sound simple, but her vision has been built by her deep comprehension of Dennis Kennedy’s quadrant model, which classifies legal tech by its focus (internal, external, legal, or business), offering a helpful framework to understand how tech interacts with the legal world.

This kind of theoric guide is very useful taking into account that business has a lot to do with legaltech. As Shreya points, “clients now want more value in less time”. “Jobs won’t disappear,” she follows, “but the value you bring will be very different”.

Many firms remain hesitant about AI, but Shreya is clear: “If you're a firm saying ‘don’t use ChatGPT,’ your employees are probably using it anyway.” But she warns against surface-level adoption: “We’ve seen this before — with electricity, with digital. Everyone wants to be seen as ‘doing AI’, but most are just bolting it on.” Echoing thinkers like Tom Goodwin, she says we risk making the same mistake we made with electricity — using it to slightly improve outdated systems instead of reimagining workflows around what’s newly possible.

Following this point,  Shreya believes the legal industry is still early in its AI journey — not because tools aren’t available, but because most firms haven’t reimagined what’s possible. “If we don’t rebuild incentives, structures, or workflows, we’ll spend more time talking about AI than using it meaningfully,” she says. 

“Adding AI to a broken process doesn’t fix it — it just makes it faster,” she cautions. “And worse, we start attributing magical intelligence to AI tools without examining what they actually understand or do.” That’s where Shreya invokes another idea — the ‘cargo cult’ mindset. “Sometimes, we think the interface or the chat output is the intelligence. But that’s just the shell. If we don’t redesign the backend — the way teams work, make decisions, or deliver value — we’ll miss the real opportunity.”

“Digital transformation often meant converting paper to PDF,” she says. “But AI requires real operating model shifts — not just new tools, but new ways of thinking.” She draws on the idea that electricity didn’t transform factories until they were rebuilt around it. “We’re still in the steam-engine stage of AI — replacing parts, not redesigning systems.”

 And it’s not just about technology. Citing thinker and creator in legal AI, Joshua Walker, Shreya says the legal sector risks falling into “cargo cult” patterns — mistaking AI’s output for understanding, and in doing so, failing to do the real work.

Looking five years ahead

When thinking about the future, Shreya predicts that “there will be massive pressure to reduce costs”. She also expects legal education to shift radically: “Curriculums will change, and regulatory bodies will raise expectations for tech skills and critical thinking” And AI? “It will almost become like electricity,” she says. “You won’t even notice it, but it will power everything”.

- Shreya Vajpei

Industry Mentor, IDEATE Lab / Chief Ecosystem Officer, Indian LegalTech Network

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