Knowledge
A week to INTA and the AI hype is powerful
May 8, 2025
One week to go and the excitement is building for INTA 2025 in San Diego. There’s little doubt that the overriding theme of the conference will be AI.
It’s not about AI, it’s about the outcome
Every single technology solution at the event will be talking about being “AI-powered”. Every new product will be “driven by AI”. Why? Because every business wants to be seen as an AI company, they want and need to be seen to be ‘innovative’ and ‘new’, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the distinct lack of meaningful innovation in IP technology over the last few years.
The real question this raises is “who cares?”. Nobody is buying AI for the sake of it, rather, users are looking for solutions to solve their problems. They want technology, either AI or otherwise, to make things better for them. They want better outcomes.
AI is simply another tool to solve these problems – but it is an incredibly powerful one. The magic of AI comes not from simply adding it to any current solution and imagining things will be better. The opportunity AI affords is the possibilities it opens up to completely reimagine how tasks are done, how complex workflows can be simplified, and, in some instances where some processes can be made obsolete.
AI should mean empowerment
RightHub was founded to address the complex challenges of making technology solutions that empower IP professionals. In the words of our founder and Chief Product Officer, Jon-James Kirtland - who has worked in IP for more than 25 years:
“The two key challenges for me were, first whether automation is really automation. For example, a docketing administrator closing an event down and generating a letter still needs to make huge efforts to complete this task, even with technology.Secondly, is technology empowering people or replacing them? Our focus is not just on building automation or using the latest technology. We want to do it in a way that is built for the users and empowers the user to do challenging and interesting work that humans enjoy and leave technology to do the boring repetitive stuff.”
Guiding principles of RightHub
These guiding principles - making automation work for users and empowering them to work smarter - are what drives our innovation for the IP industry.
We’re fortunate to have developed our IP platform in an era where AI was becoming a reality, meaning that we could think about the entire process IP professionals go through in their daily work and deploy AI where it could really make a difference to them, saving them time, reducing administration and removing friction. This is a significant advantage because we are not trying to backfit today’s technology into yesterday’s platforms but creating something completely new - built by experts in AI and IP from the ground up.
During INTA, for all the hype around being AI-powered, it’s worth questioning what the technology delivers for the IP professional. Because if solutions cannot answer that question in a detailed way that addresses saving IP professionals time, making their tasks easier to do and empowering them to do smarter, more powerful work, then they are missing the point.
