Smart AI Deployment that Empowers IP Professionals

At IP Service World in November, every booth and presentation will offer its own perspective on how artificial intelligence (AI) will transform IP management. While AI may not solve every challenge the industry faces, its potential to drive meaningful progress is undeniable. To identify real opportunities and cut through the hype surrounding AI, it is essential to understand how this technology can be a force of evolution and empowerment in the unique IP environment.

In this article, Ralph Schroeder, President of RightHub North America at Anaqua, explores how smart AI deployment can empower IP professionals by balancing innovation with responsibility and paving the way for fully integrated, AI-first IP operations.

Early applications of AI in IP focused on document processing and rule-based automation—optical character recognition, automated templates, and machine translation. These tools improved workflows such as document review and template forms, but the impact was incremental. The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 marked a watershed. Large language models (LLMs) brought capabilities that felt transformative, enabling attorneys and legal professionals to improve how they review, summarize and draft work.

As both the sophistication of the tools and user skills improves, LLM-driven applications are beginning to reshape daily practice—accelerating patent drafting, enhancing prior art research, supporting PTO interaction, and streamlining client reporting. For many professionals, this first wave of advanced AI is already delivering a step change in efficiency and consistency. The challenge now is to move beyond experimentation and selective use, toward structured, enterprise-wide integration that can generate sustained gains across the entire IP operation.

The second wave of AI is focused on automating how legal work gets done. Agentic AI harnesses the capabilities of LLMs and applies them to reasoning, planning, and autonomous action across workflows. Instead of stopping at drafting or summarization, agents initiate workflows, monitor dockets, categorize documents, and update systems in real time. AI is no longer just a desktop assistant, but an active participant embedded in the operational fabric of IP management.

Advances in LLM technologies and models are now orchestrated into systems with autonomy and authority. By coupling natural language intelligence with decision-making and task execution, agents extend AI’s impact. Agents promise efficiency, accuracy, and scalability by embedding intelligence into tasks once dependent on manual effort. Yet their adoption demands careful governance. Transparency, reliability, and human oversight are essential to ensure agentic AI strengthens professional practice rather than introduces new risks. This balance defines both the challenge and the opportunity of AI’s second wave.

Central to this balance is understanding the limits of AI — where it is appropriate, and where it is not. Intellectual property is highly valuable and regulated, and decisions made in its management carry financial, competitive, and legal consequences. Professionals are bound by strict standards of conduct and responsibility, including the principle of all due care, which cannot be delegated to machines. Agentic AI can provide efficiency and sharper insight, but the responsibility for final decisions must remain with humans.

This is why AI adoption in IP increasingly relies on AI-augmented processes rather than full automation. Human-in-the-loop models ensure that AI handles monitoring, categorization, or risk flagging, while attorneys and paralegals validate outcomes and make final determinations. Such an approach allows organizations to benefit from AI’s speed and scalability without compromising professional oversight. The objective is not to diminish human expertise but to extend it—empowering professionals to focus on higher-value strategy while ensuring AI does not inadvertently introduce risk. 

The future of enterprise IP management lies in combining the strengths of generative AI with the operational power of agentic AI to create fully integrated, AI-first IP management platforms. Generative AI tools enhance an attorney’s work, drafting, summarizing, translating, and analyzing — while agentic AI automates workflows that underpin IP operations, from docketing to client reporting to portfolio management. Together, these technologies reimagine how IP work is conducted. Critically, integration should also embed human-augmented processes: attorneys and paralegals remain the final reviewers, ensuring that automation operates within the bounds of professional responsibility and quality.

The critical challenge for IP teams is to harness AI innovations while maintaining the professional skill, judgment, and responsibility that define the practice. By striking this balance, the profession can realize the benefits of AI while safeguarding the standards of care on which clients and enterprises rely. 

For IP teams, the imperative is clear. AI should not act as a standalone tool but as an integrated part of enterprise solutions that combine generative and agentic capabilities within human-augmented workflows. This means investing in platforms that deliver efficiency and compliance, while creating governance structures that safeguard risk. The future of AI in IP will bring even greater innovation—multimodal systems that combine text, images, and data; agents that collaborate across organizational boundaries; and platforms that dynamically adapt to new rules and client demands. Teams that embrace this evolution thoughtfully, balancing ambition with responsibility, will not only improve their operations today but position themselves at the forefront of the next wave of AI-enabled innovation in IP.