By replacing policy libraries with an AI chatbot, adidas has turned its legal function into a behavioral intelligence operation, using interaction data to identify where 65,000 employees are uncertain about compliance.
adidas has deployed an AI powered question and answer tool from Melbourne based legal AI platform Josef Legal to deliver compliance and legal guidance across its global workforce of more than 65,000 employees.
The rollout began with compliance and launched alongside a new internal code of conduct. Katherine Roseveare, General Counsel for Global Functions, Global Operations and Legal Solutions at adidas, said the decision was driven by low engagement with existing formats such as policy documents, intranet pages and structured FAQs.
Legal teams at large organizations, Roseveare said, consistently produce content that employees do not read.
The rollout gave the legal function a more immediate problem to solve than document production: how to convert detailed policy knowledge into answers that a global workforce will actually seek out. For Roseveare, it is a question of matching format to behavior. A chatbot interface aligns more naturally with how employees communicate and search for information day to day.
Before choosing Josef, adidas ran a comparative evaluation against other internal options, including Microsoft Copilot and large language model application programming interfaces. Roseveare said the sensitivity of compliance topics made hallucination risk unacceptable and that employees needed certainty in the answers the system provided.
The deployment has also delivered an unanticipated benefit: visibility into questions employees would not raise with a lawyer directly.
Staff have used the tool to ask about gifts, conduct and other situations that can feel awkward to raise in person. For adidas’ legal team, that interaction data provides a secondary intelligence layer, indicating where training materials may be falling short and which compliance topics carry the most uncertainty across the business.
The tool has also reduced friction for employees working in a second language. Instead of carefully drafting an email or navigating dense internal documentation, staff can ask questions in natural language and reach a usable answer without the intermediary step of a lawyer’s time.
Roseveare’s internal benchmark for successful adoption is whether a skeptical user has been converted: if the most resistant person in a group ends up enthusiastically advocating for the tool, implementation has worked.
