The United States Patent and Trademark Office has introduced more than twenty artificial-intelligence capabilities while transitioning its infrastructure to a fully cloud-based environment, according to Chief Information Officer Deborah Stephens. The rollout reflects a broader strategy to modernize internal processes and improve service delivery across the agency’s patent and trademark functions.
Among the new tools, a large-language model named Scout is seeing active use by over seven thousand individuals on a daily and weekly basis. In addition, an AI-powered plugin has processed and summarized in excess of one hundred thousand patent applications, providing examiners with concise overviews that accelerate the review workflow.
The office is also leveraging AI within its call-center operations to address service gaps for both internal staff and external users, and it recently launched a chatbot accessible through an internal service portal. Future AI initiatives under consideration include automated searches for trademark evidence and the generation of draft office actions for both patents and trademarks.
In a related development, the USPTO announced the appointment of Jonathan Spencer as its chief AI officer. Spencer, who previously worked at Waymo, will oversee the agency’s artificial-intelligence strategy and coordinate the integration of emerging technologies across its various divisions.
Stephens indicated that the agency is currently eighty percent migrated to cloud platforms, with a target of completing the transition by June 2027. The cloud strategy involves partnerships with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and she emphasized that the move to the cloud is essential for enabling the agency’s AI capabilities at scale.
She also stressed that the quality standards applied to traditional USPTO processes must extend to AI outputs. "It was essential to get to the cloud so we could use AI as that expressway for meeting mission capabilities," Stephens said, underscoring the need for rigorous oversight of AI-generated results.