There’s a lot of debate around whether AI can one-shot patent tasks or whether human-in-the-loop will always be required. Based on what our team has achieved, I believe it will be closer to one-shot than not.

We’ve built an extensive AI pipeline for responding to office actions. We’re not the first to release an OA response tool, but after seeing a few, I believe ours is among the best.

The reason is the pipeline.

High-quality office action responses require relentlessly analyzing the weakest parts of an examiner’s argument. Our pipeline does this by giving the AI clean, tightly scoped data at exactly the right place and time, which also removes hallucinations.

The proof is in the law firms (comprising Big Law and ex-Big Law partners) using our tool. They report 30-80% time savings while achieving the same or higher quality. And those savings should only increase as the tool improves.

Because of those time savings, these firms have reduced their fixed fees, thereby passing meaningful cost reductions to their clients while retaining or surpassing previous quality levels. Imagine what you could do with 20% more budget!

(For those of us who have been in this industry for a while, a law firm proactively reducing their rates is practically unheard of.)

At a recent conference, in-house folks were asked about their budgets. Most were not expecting them to shrink. My expectation is that spending shifts rather than disappears.

If prosecution becomes significantly less expensive, companies can invest more in work that has historically been difficult to justify: acquisitions, licensing, competitive analysis, portfolio optimization, and understanding which patents actually support products and business strategy.

Patent filing costs may fall, but the rate of patentable innovation is not guaranteed to increase (separate topic). Instead, companies can spend more time extracting value from IP they already own and measuring IP the way engineering and sales teams increasingly measure themselves: by business impact and ROI.

Some of that work will naturally flow back to outside counsel.

Rather than spending most of their time drafting office action responses and applications, OC may become prosecution powerhouses—handling substantially more work in fewer hours—or more strategic advisors focused on readiness, competitive intelligence, portfolio analysis, and better IP decision-making.

I’m not convinced AI reduces the amount companies spend on intellectual property. I think it changes where they spend it.

I like the way Jensen of NVIDIA frames it: separate the task from the purpose of the job.

Writing a patent or responding to an OA is a task.

The purpose of the job is protecting and creating value from a company’s IP.

AI will continue to automate more tasks. But if the purpose remains valuable, the job does not disappear. The tasks evolve with the job. And practitioners will spend more time on different tasks that better accomplish the job.