This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Robert Plotkin, a patent attorney, computer scientist, and longtime software and AI practitioner. In what turned into a wide ranging conversation about artificial intelligence, Plotkin, who is the author of The Genie in the Machine and AI Armor: Securing the Future of Your AI Company with Strategic Intellectual Property, discusses the legal and strategic challenges confronting AI innovation. We discuss why companies should be cautious about treating AI patent counts as evidence of innovation leadership and why the most valuable AI patent portfolios are built around technology that matters to the business for a specific, articulable reason.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I explain why I believe artificial intelligence is unlikely to eliminate experienced patent lawyers. That being said, AI is already transforming prior-art searching, claim comparison, application drafting, office-action responses, and portfolio analysis. But the strategic opportunity for competently using AI is not simply to produce more patents faster, but to reach a substantially better work product within the time and budget previously required to reach an acceptable but incomplete result. With that in mind I predict that AI will expose practitioners whose work consists primarily of commodity production.

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In the latest episode of IPWatchdog Unleashed, I speak with Joel Meyer, an IP attorney and innovation strategist with more than 30 years of experience building and monetizing technology portfolios. Our conversation is about moving from patent count to patent value—and using IP strategy to preserve business optionality. That leads to a broader discussion about the role of IP counsel. A young company may not yet know whether its future lies primarily in products, services, licensing, acquisition or some combination of those paths. We discuss why the strongest IP strategies anticipate that uncertainty rather than prematurely narrowing the company’s options, and how AI can give sophisticated IP professionals better information and tools to help innovators build protection around what actually creates competitive value.

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The patent system makes a promise that has become increasingly conditional. An inventor discloses an invention to the public and, in return, receives a limited right to exclude. On paper, that bargain remains intact. In the real world, however, a patent owner often discovers that functionally the right is only defensible if the infringement is large enough (but not too large), the damages are high enough (but not too high), the portfolio is deep enough, and somebody is willing to finance years of litigation. Our conversation this week for IPWatchdog Unleashed is about what happens after a patent owner has completed the tedious work of understanding what is actually owned and is now ready to pursue a licensing or enforcement campaign.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I speak with Martin Correa. Correa, who leads foresight work at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Correa’s job is not to predict the future of IP, but to consider what futures are possible so WIPO and Member States can be better prepared for whatever eventuality does materialize. And since there is no data about the future—as he puts it—his work uses signals of change, horizon scanning and competing scenarios to expose assumptions and identify the decisions that could push the IP system in one direction or another.

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Recent amendments to Federal Rule of Evidence 702 did not invent the trial judge’s gatekeeping obligation, nor did they transform economic analysis. They did, however, sharpen the focus on the burden of establishing admissibility and whether an expert has reliably applied a valid methodology to the facts. Combined with the Federal Circuit’s increasingly demanding review of patent damages opinions, the practical message is unmistakable: the economic case must be engineered from the beginning, or you will surely suffer the consequences only after it is too late.

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The mythology surrounding the act of invention tends to concentrate on the breakthrough moment. There is a flash of insight, a sketch is made on a cocktail napkin, the prototype is assembled in a garage to prove the brilliance of the concept. Unfortunately, commercial markets are considerably less romantic. They do not reward ideas merely because they are clever, patentable or even technically superior. They reward products that work, solve a problem customers recognize, can be manufactured at an economically sustainable price and generate an acceptable return for whoever assumes the risk of bringing them to market.

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In any patent dispute, the strength of the patent still matters. But increasingly, it is not the only thing that matters—or even, in some cases, the thing that matters most. That means where a patent dispute takes place cannot be a tactical afterthought or viewed as a choice of federal district courts in the United States alone. This is true today more than ever because despite patents ostensibly being property—at least according to the Patent Act—which tribunal and which judges make the ultimate decisions affecting the patent often matter most of all because patents and patent enforcement have become driven by ideology and the type of fervor normally reserved highly emotionally charged discussions, like religion and politics.

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Patent monetization is often discussed as if the hard part begins when a patent owner makes the decision to license, sell, finance, or enforce its patent assets. That is a mistake and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the difficulties and complexities of patent monetization. By the time a patent owner is sitting across the table from a potential licensee, buyer, lender, litigation funder, or accused infringer, much of the outcome has already been fully determined. The real work begins years earlier in preparation for monetization.

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When I sat down with former USPTO Director Andrei Iancu for this week’s episode of IPWatchdog Unleashed, I expected a serious conversation about the condition of the U.S. patent system. Instead of rehashing everything that has gone wrong with the U.S. patent system from the perspective of an innovator over the last two decades, what took place was a deep and revealing conversation about whether the legal architecture that once made the United States the world’s innovation leader is still fit for purpose in an economy increasingly defined by software, artificial intelligence, data, biotechnology, and other intangible assets.

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The United States patent system is not failing because Americans have stopped inventing. It is failing because the legal and institutional architecture built to protect invention no longer operates as a coherent innovation framework. Over time, the system has become a patchwork of overlapping tribunals, inconsistent legal standards, procedural inefficiencies, and doctrinal barriers that make it harder to obtain, defend, enforce, license, and rely upon even high-quality patent rights covering innovations of extraordinary consequence. Now in the coming months we will move forward with a candid, serious, historically grounded, and focused conversation on building—not merely patching—the next American patent system.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Rama Elluru, a former PTAB Judge turned national security policy advisor. We explore the accelerating intersection of AI, patent law, and national competitiveness, as well as the hard questions policymakers will soon face around AI-assisted inventorship, patent eligibility, drug discovery, scientific research, and whether existing legal frameworks can keep pace with technologies that are advancing far faster than Congress, agencies, and courts typically move. We also address the broader national security implications of intellectual property policy, AI-enabled fraud, workforce disruption, the need for guardrails and meaningful penalties for malicious uses of AI, and why IP must be understood as a core pillar of economic and national security strategy.

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For much of the last four decades, American innovation policy has rested on a premise that should be obvious but too often is not: strong intellectual property rights are not an obstacle to competition. Quite the opposite—strong IP rights are the precursor to robust competition. The alternative to a robust patent system is not some frictionless utopia of open competition. The alternative is secrecy, copying, and underinvestment. If patents are too weak, companies will rely more heavily on trade secrets. That means less disclosure, less technical diffusion, and fewer opportunities for others to build upon what has been invented. Weak patents do not democratize innovation—they often bury it. Weak patents also reward copycats who find it far more expedient and financially rewarding to take rather than to innovate themselves. These truths were the main point at the center of my recent conversation with Alden Abbott, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and former General Counsel of the Federal Trade Commission.

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While AI can improve research, drafting, analysis, and overall work product quality, the panel emphasized that it is not a magic button and cannot replace expert legal judgment. The most effective use of AI in patent practice is incremental, targeted, and lawyer-directed—more co-pilot than autopilot. Panelists explored the risks created when inventors, clients, or law firms over-rely on AI-generated disclosures, patent application critiques, or claim strategy recommendations, including the potential for increased attorney workload, inventorship complications, technical inaccuracies, and downstream litigation vulnerabilities. The conversation ultimately framed AI as both a market disruptor and a strategic opportunity for patent law firms. Firms that respond defensively or compete solely on price risk being pushed into an unsustainable race to the bottom. Firms that lean into client education, workflow redesign, transparent billing expectations, disciplined AI usage, and higher-value counseling will be better positioned to compete. The panel made clear that AI will not eliminate the need for sophisticated patent counsel; it will expose which firms are genuinely strategic partners and which are merely labor providers.

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This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Kristen Osenga, who is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Richmond School of Law. Kristen is a familiar voice to many in the patent community. She has been a regular participant in serious conversations about patent law, standard essential patents (SEPs), antitrust, competition policy, injunctions, and the broader innovation ecosystem.

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