Reaping The Benefits Of Artificial Intelligence

By Ronda Majure —Global Head of Sales, CompuMark, a brand of Clarivate Analytics

Merging of the old and new

Your brand is everything in the global marketplace. It is no exaggeration to say that a business now lives and dies by both its offline, online and social reputation. Because of this, searching a trademark is more vital than ever before. It is important for trademark professionals to work faster and more effectively in searching, clearing and registering strong marks to ensure clients have a competitive advantage. To do so requires the merging of the old and new: the specific knowledge that only highly experienced trademark experts can provide, with the advantages of the latest wave of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Ronda Majure

AI has already proved its worth in a variety of industries, and has been described by Thomson Reuters as one of the top three emerging trends for this year: “The advancement of machine learning and other techniques in artificial intelligence are giving businesses and their development teams the opportunities to design data-driven applications that can recognise patterns to become sufficiently ‘cognitive’ to reduce and even automate repetitive manual work[1].” It predicts that it could be the legal profession to reap the benefits most: “the next few years will likely favor lawyers who can use partial states of automation to outperform their peers[2].”

A digital pair of hands

AI is most effective when used to automate previously manually-intensive tasks that could suffer from unacceptably high error rates. In the legal sphere, AI can be used to automate complex cognitive tasks and increase the effectiveness of search and watch results, while also improving speed and efficiency. Researching trademarks is one job when it is imperative that errors are eradicated. Yet handing the role entirely on to an AI is risky. Rather, it should be combined with human experts. To achieve this necessary knowledge, the best providers will work closely with experienced trademark analysts and linguists across multiple geographies to learn what they do, why they are doing something a particular way and why they choose certain results over others. Only after collaborating with them over a long period of time, can businesses get under the skin and begin to start to think like trademark analysts.

Back to school

Neural network technology is a commonly used branch of AI that is used in the trademark process. Designed to work in much the same way as the human brain, neural network technology is ‘trained’ by using vast amounts of data so that it can accurately perform semantic equivalence. This then determines the ‘relatedness’ of marks, helping providers make even more accurate decisions.

AI has also been used to deliver self-service clearance solutions to clients looking to trademark brand names, slogans and logos. These solutions employ neural networks and other AI technologies to automate and accelerate previously complex trademark search and analysis processes. Deep learning techniques are also often used to identify semantically related terms, while helping to further improve recall to minimize the risk of missing relevant marks.

You can’t buy experience

Relying on technology alone could lead to issues down the road. Instead, AI should be used to assist trademark experts rather than replacing them. You still can’t buy experience. The best human analysts are able to make the kind of nuanced judgements that machines, no matter how powerful, cannot. Experience allows analysts to look at search or watch results and rank them in a way that they know will be most meaningful to the customer. Analysts will also have deep, developed relationships with their customers that gives them a clear understanding of their requirements – something that currently cannot be matched by technology; at least until the singularity is eventually reached.

No matter how sophisticated AI may now be, it is no use without clean and up-to-date and error proofed data for it to analyze. The best trademark solutions providers will have a dedicated team whose sole responsibility is to review and correct trademark office data before adding it all to their own proprietary trademark database. This involves reviewing hundreds of trademark records daily and finding errors such as a word mark that doesn’t match the image or a misspelling that could be missed by an online searching tool.

While the quality of AI is improving, human analysts are able to work with a level of proactivity that cannot be achieved through current technology. For example, a quality analyst would look at a multi-word mark or slogan and attach relevance to the most important parts of that mark. Once this is done, AI-enabled technology can be used to display all relevant results in a format that makes sense – a perfect marriage of human experience and technological sophistication.

Bringing humans and technology together

Trademark watching solutions continue to improve on their speed and precision. IT professionals continue their tireless work to bring AI technology towards an even more sophisticated and human level. By using the latest breed of AI to further refine semantics, the goal will be to catch even more relevant, targeted results in a bid to reduce risk and save trademark professionals valuable time to ensure that brands remain protected.

There is no doubt that technology has a huge role to play within the trademark process, helping to cull down massive amounts of information that takes time to currently sift through and display it in new and intuitive ways that weren’t possible before. However, no matter what technological innovations we will see in the future, they will need to remain focused on the real-world needs of trademark professionals. By working hand in hand with them, technology can empower human experts to make those all-important decisions with an unprecedented level of accuracy and in less time than ever before. By bringing both humans and technology together, the trademark process will continue to evolve and thrive.

[1] https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/the-top-three-emerging-tech-trends-in-2017/

[2] https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/artificial-intelligence-legal-practice/

Image Credits: CompuMark