With the annual meeting of the International Trademark Association in the books for 2025, many companies used the event to promote AI-powered services to legal firms and IP professionals. IP administrators are scrambling to find ways to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their operations, using the incredible predictive power of modern AI solutions to simplify and streamline their existing workflows.
In the IP industry, traditional development was largely overseen by legal teams and organisations, which can limit progress with longwinded processes and create invisible barriers to innovation. With AI tools in use, IP professionals can cut out financial headwinds and innovation silos, focussing on meeting deadlines and achieving the best possible results.
Like other industries that are trying to calculate exactly how AI can improve strategies and workflows for the future, the IP industry must answer a simple question: how can AI be used to enhance the operation of professionals without replacing or hindering existing systems?
How AI will augment, not replace, the work of IP professionals
One of the defining factors in deciding how AI can be best used to enhance the work of IP professionals will be ensuring that despite the incredible power of AI tools, crucial human oversight is maintained, combining enhanced efficiency with the accuracy of skilled professionals.
Using AI, businesses can instantly receive the information they need, constantly updating the data recorded, and ensuring that IP protection is being monitored around the clock. This approach optimises opportunities for commercialisation, whilst cutting costs significantly, greatly increasing the return on investment for brands that require IP management, as well as keeping the brand’s name and reputation safely intact.
Building on this foundation of efficiency, AI also enables organisations to track the progress and impact of their innovations. These tools also support forecasting, allowing businesses to test how various ideas might influence operations and assess whether they align with strategic objectives.
The partnership between traditional and modern methods is therefore clearly critical for the IP industry in ensuring that enhanced workflows continue to augment, not replace, the vital role of IP professionals in the constantly evolving nature of the industry.
Uses of AI continuing to grow
Whilst AI’s use in the IP industry is already far-reaching, new developments in how the industry can further benefit from the technology are constantly being progressed. For businesses of all sizes, keeping up with these changes will be key to staying at the very cutting edge of AI technology. One example of these new developments is AI docketing, which is able to transform an 8–12-minute task down to a single click, a huge time saver for IP professionals in the short term, and a huge money saver for businesses in the long term.
Docketing, which refers to the systematic tracking and management of deadlines and important events related to IP assets such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, and designs, can be a hugely time-consuming, and labour-intensive process when completed traditionally.
As part of this, IP professionals must spend time reviewing opportunities to ensure deadlines aren’t missed, as well as looking out for further commercial options, which can become confusing for operators who may be responsible for a large number of individual brands or patents.
With AI docketing in place however, these deadlines are almost impossible to miss. The transformative power of AI is able to understand the upcoming requirements for the IP in question, and can either alert the administrator, or in some cases, action the next step itself.
This one example represents the huge strides that AI tools are taking to simplify workflows across the industry, helping brands continue to maximise the protection of their content, by streamlining administrative tasks so that IP professionals can keep their eyes on further opportunities.
Again then, while AI technology continues to race forward, the importance of a cohesive human and AI approach is still apparent. This approach offers the best of what IP professionals can do, with administrative augmentation from AI that prevents businesses from getting held back by time-consuming but crucial day-to-day tasks.
Continuing to stay on top of AI developments
For IP professionals, staying on top of developments such as AI docketing is clearly important if they are to maintain the pace of rival businesses and industries. With companies keen to garner the rights to patents and IP daily, ensuring the newest tools are being used could prove critical.
The need to stay across the latest in AI technology is not only to simplify the existing workflows but is also about protecting property in response to the additional new challenges brought on by AI. With IP now potentially being included as part of AI data sets, there are now new threats to copyright protection that can be more successfully defended against with AI tools in place.
The importance of this poacher-turned-game-keeper role for AI is currently being played out in UK courts, as the Getty vs Stability AI case continues to threaten new precedents for copyright law, while the UK government closes in on new policies to clarify the situation.
Getty is suggesting that its images have been used by the AI developer via its Stable Diffusion system, meaning that images may have been included in code and making it possible for users of this system to edit, adapt and commercialise these images for their own use. If the result of this case, or indeed any follow-up government regulation, were to allow IP to be more freely included in AI coding, then the opportunities for commercialisation would change dramatically, meaning that IP businesses must be fully prepared for a rapidly changing landscape.
Again, to target this new danger to IP protection, a cohesive operation of AI tools alongside the experience of IP professionals will be paramount. Professionals will be required to analyse
how outside AI datasets could change their role and opportunities, with AI supporting to ensure they are picking up on any misuse of IP.
Addressing data privacy concerns
In addition to concerns around how AI datasets are using IP, data privacy is also a bone of contention for companies considering how to implement AI into their workflows. AI tools, with their ability to scour through almost unlimited points of data, are far more likely to come across sensitive information that is being stored. If this information does not remain safely protected, IP administrators may miss out on opportunities or may damage brand trust as information becomes public before it is intended to do so.
Companies are addressing this by creating their own proprietary large language model (LLM). The data stored in these LLM’s is not only kept private through self-containment but is monitored by AI tools to ensure that they don’t appear in AI datasets or indeed in the public domain.
The alternative method, using Open Source LLM’s, allows data to be accessed publicly, increasing the risk around IP. While organisations using these LLM’s take measures to secure private data, through securing training datasets, monitoring model integrity, and implementing access controls tailored to AI systems, the public nature of them leaves them open to exploitation and error.
While there are advantages to using these LLM’s, such as a community-driven development process, for IP administrators, protecting against AI’s ability to process large amounts of data is the most important factor, and so taking steps such as using in-built proprietary LLM’s may prove crucial to minimising risk in this increasingly AI-led space.
AI: Friend or Foe?
While there are examples of how AI is the main driver behind the increasing complication and requirements being placed on the shoulders of IP professionals, there is also little doubt that AI tools are the solution to a host of industry problems and bottlenecks.
AI allows professionals to spend less time in the day-to-day administration and instead be on the lookout for further opportunities for commercialisation, as they look to set themselves apart from the rest of the industry.
However, the role of these professionals in this process is not being diminished, even with the transformative power of AI leading this new era of IP protection. In fact, their expertise in analysing opportunities and communication with patent offices, makes a cohesive approach the most likely to achieve the best results.
Whether IP businesses are on board with AI tools or not, their impact on the IP industry is only growing, and these businesses now face a decision. Keep up with AI using AI tools or fall behind and risk missing out on opportunities in an increasingly complex landscape.
