USPTO looks to AI agents to ease examiner workloads
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The office’s Acting Commissioner for Patents Barry Schindler said putting agents in the hands of its examiners “can shorten that [review process] to one year, because you can pick up the phone and have conversations.”
Although agentic artificial intelligence systems are poised to help the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office significantly reduce the time it takes to review applications by streamlining rote tasks, a top official with the agency said the capabilities also have another added benefit — empowering skilled examiners to rely more on human-to-human interactions rather than the typical stream of impersonal correspondence.
Barry Schindler, USPTO’s acting commissioner for patents, said the agency currently has a diverse staff of patent reviewers, including PhD biochemists who review relevant patent applications. Rather than bogging these personnel down with tedious tasks during the three-step pre-exam, examination and post-exam patent lifecycle process, Schindler said USPTO has turned, in part, to a new agentic tool — called Compass — to help.
Examiners reviewing man-made or altered DNA sequences, for instance, first have to see if the submitted sequences are correct before determining whether or not they can be patented.
Schindler said these reviewers frequently have to engage in a “back and forth, back and forth, back and forth” dialogue with applicants, which is largely conducted through written correspondence. Now, Schindler said Compass “does what's called a formality check” to speed along the process.
“So then what happens now? I've got a PhD biochemist who had been hired to do what they were supposed to do,” Schindler said during the Google Public Sector Summit on Tuesday.
With a current backlog of 700,000 applications for review, and a staff of around 9,000 patent examiners, USPTO needs to turn to AI agents for help, he said, adding that further adoption of these tools can help promote more consistency in the review process.
“You as an applicant may get an examiner who has 20 years of experience, and at the same time you may get an examiner who has two years,” he said. “We put our examiners online almost immediately; we have to. We have this backlog. So what we're looking to do with this whole [AI] and [agentic agents thing] is how do we start getting consistency? So that examiner who has two years, how do we impart that knowledge that's similar?”
Providing patent examiners with a consistent review process and giving them AI tools to help navigate often cumbersome tasks, Schindler said, means skilled employees can more fully leverage their talents.
“The thing that is missing — and we don't have time to do it — is the human interaction,” Schindler said, noting that patent examinations are often “a negotiation” between applicant and examiner.
“If part of that iterative process is, instead of the examiner just putting paper — they do paper — back and forth, can we get the examiner on the phone and start having this human interaction? And examiners will say, ‘I love that, but I don't have time because I'm doing this [other stuff],’” he said.
Rather than taking sometimes five years for applicants to receive a patent, Schindler said “we can shorten that to one year, because you can pick up the phone and have conversations” by using agents to help shoulder some of the other workload.
Adoption of these tools, however, doesn’t need to be large. Schindler said even small uses of these capabilities are beneficial and noted that some research studies have shown that too much reliance on AI tools can impair cognitive skills.
“If somebody starts relying on agents and [they] don't understand the fundamentals and don't continue to learn the fundamentals, they can get dumb,” he said. “And so I have that issue that I have to think about: [using] agents, but how does the agent assist and not take over?”
Focusing on the underlying problem, rather than a one-size solution, Schindler added, is a necessity when it comes to maximizing the effectiveness of new capabilities like those offered by agents.
USPTO has previously touted some of the other AI tools it’s rolled out to help improve its internal operations, including an enterprise AI tool named Scout — a chatbot assistant used by personnel to help analyze, draft, research and summarize content.