Invention Disclosure in the AI Era: Why Most New Inventions Never Reach Your Patent Team

A large company today has far more inventors than its patent team can see. AI put a capable research assistant on every desk, and people who were never hired to invent now can reach novel, patentable solutions in the course of ordinary work. Most of them will never think to tell anyone in legal.

Who counts as an inventor now

Ordinary AI use has become common enough to change who can invent. Gallup found that the share of US employees who use AI in their role climbed from 21 percent in 2023 to 40 percent in 2025. Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, based on an Edelman survey of 20,000 knowledge workers who use AI, reported that 58 percent say they are producing work they could not have produced a year earlier. Those figures mean the number of employees who can reach a patentable result during everyday work has expanded well past the group the patent team was built to track.

Ordinary work is producing patentable results

Access to a capable model changes the kind of work an ordinary employee can finish alone. A person who can describe a problem clearly to a capable model can now reach a genuinely novel solution to it, the sort of result that used to depend on the research and engineering staff a company hires precisely to invent. The people reaching those results work in operations, support, and other roles that were never defined around invention. The problem in front of them was the assignment, so they solve it and move on without noticing the result is patentable.

A logistics analyst might ask a model to reconcile two incompatible scheduling systems and arrive, over an afternoon, at a method that is new and not obvious to others in the field. The method could remove a scheduling conflict that has cost the operation hours every week across dozens of shipments. Nothing in that afternoon looks like invention to the person doing it. The same kind of result appears in finance and support functions the patent team has never had reason to watch.

Why these results never become invention disclosures

The patent team learns about an invention when someone reports it. That reporting system was designed around a smaller and clearly identified population of inventors. Disclosure forms and inventor reminders were aimed at the research and engineering organization, where flagging what one builds is understood to be part of the job. A person in a support or operations role carries none of that context. Nobody has told that person that a workaround built in a spreadsheet or a support macro can meet the standard for a patent. The solution they reach never registers to them as an invention worth mentioning. No disclosure gets filed, and the work moves into a product or a process the patent team never had a chance to review.

Why more disclosure reminders will not close the gap

Adding more reminders does not close this gap. Every reminder lands only with the audience that already understands it, and that audience never includes the employees who do not think of themselves as inventors. A drive that depends on a non-inventor recognizing their own work as patentable and then reporting it asks for a judgment those employees have no reason to make. The older approach can be run harder without reaching a single new person.

How to capture invention disclosures when everyone uses AI

Invention harvesting means finding patentable inventions in the work employees already produce. People leave a detailed trail of what they build in the documents and tickets they generate as they work, whether or not any of it was ever labeled an invention. When the patent team reads that trail for patentable subject matter, it finds candidates it would otherwise never see. ArcPrime's innovation listener does exactly this. Once it is connected to the tools a company already works in, it surfaces likely inventions for the patent team to review, without waiting for anyone to recognize their own work or file a disclosure. A large enterprise produces far more of this work than any team could chase down by hand, and an invention that no one flags can be lost once it ships in a product.