Recent years have been tainted by market practices that continuously expose us, as consumers, to new risks and threats. We have become accustomed, and sometimes even resigned, to businesses monitoring our activities, examining our data, and even meddling with our choices. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often depicted as a weapon in the hands of businesses and blamed for allowing this to happen. In this paper, we envision a paradigm shift, where AI technologies are brought to the side of consumers and their organizations, with the aim of building an efficient and effective counter-power. AI-powered tools can support a massive-scale automated analysis of textual and audiovisual data, as well as code, for the benefit of consumers and their organizations. This in turn can lead to a better oversight of business activities, help consumers exercise their rights, and enable the civil society to mitigate information overload. We discuss the societal, political, and technological challenges that stand before that vision.

Artificial Intelligence and Law is undergoing a critical transformation. Traditionally focused on the development of expert systems and on a scholarly effort to develop theories and methods for knowledge representation and reasoning in the legal domain, this discipline is now adapting to a sudden change of scenery. No longer confined to the walls of academia, it has welcomed new actors, such as businesses and companies, who are willing to play a major role and seize new opportunities offered by the same transformational impact that recent AI breakthroughs are having on many other areas. As it happens, commercial interests create new opportunities but they also represent a potential threat to consumers, as the balance of power seems increasingly determined by the availability of data. We believe that while this transformation is still in progress, time is ripe for the next frontier of this field of study, where a new shift of balance may be enabled by tools and services that can be of service not only to businesses but also to consumers and, more generally, the civil society. We call that frontier consumer-empowering AI.