Despite the “rough and rocky” journey, the US Patent and Trademark Affairs Office is fully committed to generative artificial intelligence solutions to improve business operations.
USPTO officials held Tuesday's discussion on the future of agencies that are using AI for various missions, as well as comments asking for information on the latest requests for information on available automated products and solutions currently being developed by agents.
“The biggest lessons we've learned [when introducing AI] “We are pleased to announce that we are committed to providing a range of services and services to helping people with a range of services,” said Jamie Holcombe, USPTO Chief Information Officer. “We need to know the security of our data structures, data elements, data flows and, most importantly, our data.
One tool that emerged from this approach is Scout, the acronym for “search, integration, overview, understanding.” Scout is built from a large language model to create chatbot assistants that help code development, detect inappropriate filings, cybersecurity threat detection and compliance efforts, and more.
Debbie Stephens, USPTO's Deputy Chief Information Officer, said Scout started as an internal AI development that grew to support more than 200 users as of June 2025.
“Scout, a homemade Genai web application, has already proven its capabilities and we believe we are looking forward to the beta version at the end of the summer,” says Stephens.
Greg Vidovich's patent vice-chairman added that the agency's patent end-to-end search tool is an AI-powered cloud-based system that allows you to obtain data on US patents, Grant's publications in advance, and foreign patents employed by agent examiners.
“From March 2014 to February 2015, examiners used it in their offices nearly 850,000 times,” says Vidovich. “And for now, this fiscal year… we're even seeing a high adoption rate. I think we'll be approaching a million people in this fiscal year alone or very close to that.”
Scouts, PE2E, and other internal search tools have one common goal. It's about benefiting internal and external stakeholders alike through rapid quality control, accurate application modification updates, and improving contract dependencies.
Moving forward, agents aim to continue with more AI tools and solutions, helping to inspect lawyers and shorten the overall latency of the trademark process.
“I like to call it an extended intelligence because we have found the greatest intensity of our spending to augment the examiner's tasks, in order to create more time for more thoughtful human thinking and free the examiner from managers and administrative tasks,” Holcomb said.
