At the US Patent & Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, artificial intelligence (AI) projects are expediting the patent classification process, helping detect fraud, and expanding examiners' searches for similar patents, enabling them to search through more documents in the same amount of time. And every project started with a pilot project. "Proofs of concept (PoCs) are a key approach we use to learn about new technologies, test business value assumptions, de-risk scale project delivery, and inform full production implementation decisions," says USPTO CIO Jamie Holcombe. Once the pilot proves out, he says, the next step is to determine if it can scale. Indian e-commerce vendor Flipkart has followed a similar process before deploying projects that allow for text and visual search through millions of items for customers who speak 11 different languages.

The nation's top inventors and businesses rely heavily on the United States Patent and Trademark Office to issue patents for inventions and register trademarks for product and intellectual property identification. The agency has come to embrace increasingly more emerging and advanced technologies in recent years to meet its mission, and it is now also enduring a large-scale modernization. USPTO Chief Information Officer Jamie Holcombe is working to help make the agency's systems "better, cheaper and faster." Holcombe joined the agency at the request of Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director Andrei Iancu, who immediately articulated his aims to "propel the USPTO into the next decade." "He wanted to ensure that all the up-to-date commercial tools were available to the USPTO examiners so that we could conduct our business in the most advanced way possible," Holcombe told Nextgov in the latest episode of Critical Update.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently launched a recruitment effort to hire its first-ever senior-level artificial intelligence expert to advance the agency's applications of the emerging technology and provide technical expertise to keep employees on the leading edge. In a conversation with Nextgov, USPTO's chief information officer provided a look inside the search to fill the new role and explained how it all fits into the agency's broader vision around modernization. "We need to figure out how we can use those algorithms to the best of our abilities," CIO Henry "Jamie" Holcombe said Friday. "We've seen an explosion in AI submissions and so AI is now maturing to a point to where it actually can be used--we don't want it to be a buzzword." USPTO's mission is to award patents to inventors and businesses and register trademarks for products and intellectual property. When Holcombe took on the agency's top information technology management role earlier this year, the office already had many AI-related efforts underway.