The questions patent teams ask, or are being asked, are the same ones they always have been. What's changed is what counts as a good answer.
Boards want strategy, not citations. R&D wants competitive intelligence, not search results. Legal wants confidence that every filing will hold up – with the evidence to back it. The day job hasn't moved from one set of questions to another. It's moved from finding patents to making sense of them at the speed the business now decides.
For the last decade, we've been working on the fundamental problem: how to find the right information in the first place. Without that foundation, nothing else works. Our industry has a long list of acronyms for what happens when it doesn't (GIGO is probably the most polite), and the stakes only go up as more of our work moves to AI. If you've used IPRally for patentability, prior art, FTO, or any other technical search, you already know what we're talking about. We've changed how that work gets done, becoming the industry standard and benchmark in delivering answers, with our customers seeing the impact of this.
Why we said no in the past
Our customers have always asked for more, though. Sometimes we have delivered, and sometimes we have chosen to not get distracted from what has been our core mission. We have delivered things like Ask AI, collaboration, monitoring and classification that are closely related to how our customers search and process the data we provide using our proprietary models (”Graph AI”). But we have also had to explain that some things are not in scope, like licensing and commercialization solutions, visualization, ”analytics”, structure or sequence searching or patent drafting. These have been areas we were not focusing on, for various reasons.
One way to look at it is that we have focused on solving the ”micro aspects” in what our customers need to do, and not the ”macro aspects”. The tactics more than the strategy. This has proven to be the right decision, as the decision to stay focused on our core mission has usually been down to one or all of three things:
- Resources required to build solutions that are meeting our, and your, expectations without taking away from the core mission,
- Technology not being capable of producing the type of solutions we want to produce,
- Technology not being able to accelerate our efforts to build internally.
If you are familiar with IPRally, you know that we set the bar very high. We don’t want to do anything unless we can do it better than it has been done before. We want to have a fundamental impact and change how things are done when build our solutions. If we are just slapping some visualization tools on top of our results, or allowing customers to copy-paste the draft claims that we generate as part of our search process, we are not aiming high enough. We wouldn’t provide enough value.
Why now
Our ambition, the market's maturity, and what's now technically possible have finally lined up. We are now getting to a point where we can deliver solutions in other areas that meet our and, more importantly, your expectations.
So, to the reason for my excitement: Moving forward, we will now start to add capabilities that are aiming to solve more and different problems for our customers in IPRally, while continuing to push the boundaries for search and information retrieval. This applies to both the types of processes we support and how we deliver our solutions.
While we will dive deeper into some of the other directions in the near future, we are very excited to share that we will be focusing more on the ”intelligence layer” and start to add impactful solutions to provide answers that feed the strategy that help define the tactics. The macro supports the micro. Analytics. Visualization. Reporting. Actionable insights. Whatever label we put on it, the point is the same: we’re now releasing features that add the macro level on top of the answers we already provide.
We call it IPRally Intelligence. The tools and methods are new. The principles aren't:
- High quality data, search and best-in-class embeddings that process patent information faster and more accurately than any other method.
- A deep understanding of the patent domain – solutions that don't just find the right document, but understand the nuance of patents at a granular level.
You've probably already noticed: Even with everything that's changed in AI over the last few years, most macro-level patent analysis is still demanding work. Most solutions offered still include off the shelf graphs looking at basic metadata, AI that can’t tell a patent from an annual report. Reporting that looks nice but doesn’t actually tell you anything. Meaningful analysis still depends on reading and understanding the details in individual patents, and on knowing why you're asking the question in the first place. The news here is that we're now building applications that do this at scale.
What’s new today
The new Intelligence capabilities apply the approach we've already proven to the strategic work. Classification is done by reading and understanding each patent in detail. Macro-level questions are answered by probing each individual patent to understand its scope.
This allows you to do true, meaningful analysis that would take humans weeks in just minutes, and report it in actionable formats. It lets the journalist in you find the scoop and tell the story, immediately.
The ambition is that most patent-related question that can be asked – from the boardroom, from the patent team, from R&D or from legal – should be answerable with the same speed and confidence that IPRally already delivers. This includes technical and competitive analysis, monitoring reporting, and everything in between. Get the full picture, not just the piece you went looking for.
As of today, three new Intelligence capabilities are included in your IPRally license, as a preview:
- Smart Tags - our next generation, LLM based patent classification tool that allows you to build custom classifiers with or without training data, and tag and structure data for all purposes
- Analyst AI - the evolution of Ask AI, where you can ask any questions about the content hidden in large amounts of patent data - summarize, compare, identify trends, emerging technologies. Just ask, and your personal analyst will answer.
- Visualization - an initial thematic scattergram that shows technical themes in patent datasets alongside our existing visualization tools. More impactful visualization, reporting and analysis tools to come in the near future.
As of today, you can:
- Classify a portfolio in plain English, with no training-data project required.
- Map a competitive landscape, and explain what you're seeing in a meeting the same day.
- Pressure-test what and where to file next, with the patent data you already have.
- Describe what you've found in a format and narrative your stakeholders can act on.
These capabilities are available today, as a preview, to everyone using IPRally. You can build classifiers, tag data, extract intelligence from large datasets, and visualize patterns at no extra cost. As we add more capabilities, we'll combine them and offer them as a new license type called – and you've probably guessed – IPRally Intelligence. There will likely be a cost associated with the full release, but until that point, these previews are yours to use.
What’s next
The end goal is to do for patent analysis and intelligence what we've already done for patent search: change how the work gets done.
Given that we are in the era of agents and agentic AI, this will of course also apply here. Our vision is that you will have agents for many of the most impactful tasks you have to perform. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Try these new features and reflect on how you used to do this in the past. Or as late as yesterday. Isn’t the new world amazing?
Patent search was and is the foundation. Patent intelligence is next. The same principles and standards apply. As always, we are excited to have you build the future with us!
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