Christmas Time at Honda: Buy a Car, a Generator, or a Patent AI-Tool

by: Tom Hochstatter, President

Black Friday (weekend) has now come and gone for us here in the U.S. - well almost. I guess once we’re through Cyber Monday tomorrow we can fully check the box of over-consumption commerce; don’t forget that additional pallet of toilet paper and hand sanitizer for the pending next virus shut-down [when will we learn?]. Anyhow, I digress.

While doing my red-blooded American internet commerce activities this weekend - determining how big of an 8k TV I could convince my wife we really needed “Right Now!” (minimum 85 inch, for those asking), I came across a story from IAM about Honda preparing to sell an AI-solution for large patent portfolio management. It appears the tool is designed to help them justify patent maintenance decisions among other things.

With a bit of digging, it turns out they have been at it for some time according to this story from September 2019. It makes a ton of sense (if not a direct affront to the solutions Techson & Limestone currently offer). An ominious proclamation from their internal folk.

“Mr. Bessho [Honda] plans that as the AI programs increase in aptitude, human review of every patent will become unnecessary. ”

It may be some time before the human experts are fully replaced by patent AI-tools. The idea of humans + machines is more the correct approach and one that we’ve fully embraced here at Techson - design tools to make the experts more efficient, don’t look for a design to replace them.

Honda’s tool appears to be working as expected; no surprise. They have identified somewhere near 7,000 patents to abandon according to this August story from IAM. On one hand, I am happy that their tool is working as designed, but, on the other, I am also struck with the 7,000 patents metric. What on earth do they do next? Do they simply not pay the maintenance fees? Do they dump all 7,000 on the open patent market? How are they packaging, or collateralizing those patents? How are they pricing them? How are they identifying prospective buyers or licensees? Who might want them, and why?

We are working on answering questions like these in 2021 with more tools, partnerships, and human experts to assist forward-thinking firms like Honda, and hopefully hundreds more achieve a new level of ROI and efficiency with their own massive portfolios - without tipping the delicate supply & demand scales that already teeter wildly in our industry due to all sorts of other wildly irrational behaviors.

So, for 2021 I promise to: a) be even more diligent to the competitive product & solution landscape around Techson and, b) be even more vigilant to the fact that if my customers are reduced to building their own in-house tools to do what my company should be offering there will be hell to pay internally.

And there will be no new big screen TVs in our 2021 future either.