USPTO touts success in AI applications
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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has initiated several programs — such as the Scout chatbot assistant and PE2E search tool — in an effort to streamline the work done by human employees.
Despite a “rough and rocky” journey, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is going all-in on generative artificial intelligence solutions to help improve its business operations.
Officials from USPTO hosted a Tuesday discussion on the agency’s future leveraging AI for its various missions, the comments it’s looking for on its recent request for information on available automated offerings and the solutions the agency is currently developing.
“The biggest lesson we learned [when introducing AI] was that all AI requires knowing your data, knowing data structure, data elements, data flow and, most importantly, data security,” said Jamie Holcombe, USPTO’s chief information officer. “We realize that we are now in an era of intelligent computing where we succeed only by combining data, AI and infrastructure security for results and measurable outcomes.”
One of the tools born from this approach is Scout, an acronym for “searching, consolidating, outlining and understanding.” Scout is built from a large language model to create a chatbot assistant that can help with code development, detect improper filings, support cybersecurity threat detection and compliance efforts, and more.
Debbie Stephens, USPTO’s deputy chief information officer, said that Scout began as an internal AI development that grew to support over 200 users as of June 2025.
“We believe our homegrown GenAI web application, Scout, has already proven its capabilities and look forward to a beta version in late summer,” Stephens said.
Acting Deputy Commissioner for Patents Greg Vidovich added that the agency’s Patents End-to-End Search Tool is an AI-powered cloud-based system that can retrieve data on filed U.S. patents, pre-grant publications and foreign patents that the agency’s examiners have adopted en masse.
“From March ‘24 through February ‘25, examiners use this almost 850,000 times in the office,” Vidovich said. “And so far this fiscal year … we're seeing even a higher adoption rate. I believe we're going to get close to a million uses this fiscal year alone, or very close to that.”
Scout, PE2E and other internal search tools have one common goal: To benefit internal and external stakeholders alike with quick quality control, accurate application amendment updates and improved contract dependency.
Moving forward, the agency is looking to continue acquiring more AI tools and solutions to assist patent examiners and trademark examining attorneys, as well as reduce the overall wait times in the trademark process.
“I prefer to call it augmented intelligence, because that's where we have found the biggest bang for our buck in augmenting examiner tasks to create more time for more thoughtful human thinking, to relieve the examiner from administrative and clerical tasks,” Holcombe said.