Approaching 24 months after ChatGPT exploded into the public consciousness, questions about how artificial intelligence can revolutionise workflows to save businesses time and, crucially, money abound. 

Cutting through the hubbub can be hard. Prolific marketing of the latest tools, pressure from above to experiment with its use and incoming guidance and regulations make for a tricky environment for chief IP officers.

IAM’s latest Special Report ‘Navigating IP in the Age of AI’ provides a guide for chief IP officers. Our expert authors walk you through using AI in the workplace, from innovation to protection and monetisation, the key messages from patent offices in the United States, China and Europe and the core debates in AI beyond patents.

Our first section is your handbook, including a step-by-step approach to how to leverage AI reasoning in IP workflows while managing the crucial balance between potential benefits and data security concerns. We also look at key considerations when creating AI R&D policies and examine the risks for IP teams that may not be in a position to spin-up their own, bespoke AI tools. As Seurat’s Laura Daly tells us: “Many of us are dipping our toes in the pool, but we are concerned by the sharks we cannot see in the water.”

At the same time, a raft of incoming regulations and guidance also have the potential to wholly disrupt IP strategy. The EU AI Act requires new, strategic thinking by CIPOs who may also be tasked with understanding and navigating USPTO guidance and getting to grips with the approaches taken by other major jurisdictions, like China. Our report covers these essential developments and digs into what they mean for in-house strategists.

Finally, we examine the key debates at the intersection between AI and intellectual property. We look at how AI may be used effectively in the enforcement of trade secrets, in particular the role of machine learning and generative AI in assisting organisations to help defend against misappropriation and in the detection of misuse and any subsequent litigation.

We scrutinise the changing copyright landscape, suddenly high on the agenda as questions proliferate around the data used to train AI models as well as how advancing technologies are generating new opportunities for the creation of valuable IP, including for the protection and monetisation of both healthcare-related high-tech inventions and of drugs that have been developed with the assistance of AI.

You can access ‘Navigating IP in the Age of AI’ here.