By Benoit Chevalier, SaaS products director – patents, Questel
AI continues to dominate headlines as legal practitioners at firms and corporate law departments explore how it will transform their businesses. Aiming to discover more about AI’s impact on the intellectual property (IP) field, Questel recently released the findings of its 2025 IP Outlook Research Report entitled “Pathways to Productivity: AI in IP”, the much-awaited follow-up to its inaugural 2024 study “Beyond the Hype: How Technology is Transforming IP.” The 2025 Report (“the Report”) polled over 500 patent and trademark professionals from various continents and countries across the globe.
The Report featured an expanded focus on AI, drilling deep to reveal IP professionals’ attitudes toward and adoption of AI. The results were surprising, at times seeming to contradict other findings drawn from the same population. Intrigued, Questel conducted further analysis to reveal greater insight.
Abundant Enthusiasm, Low Adoption
According to the Report, 77% of IP law professionals were enthusiastic about AI solutions and only 5% expressed reluctance to use them. This shows significant progress compared to the 2024 study where only 62% were enthusiastic and a greater 11% were reluctant/risk averse. This uptick in positive feeling shows IP professionals have a growing comfort level with AI in 2025. However, another question from the 2025 survey about AI usage found that only 58% of respondents were actually using AI tools regularly and experiencing a positive impact. That means 42% (close to half) were not using AI tools.
Additionally, the Report revealed that only 25% of the IP practitioners were actually applying AI to their everyday work. The remaining 75% using AI were experimenting, only utilizing it once per week or per month, which is not frequently enough to meaningfully boost productivity. Overall, the Report showed that while many IP professionals are enthusiastic about AI, most are not ready to fully jump in with both feet. IP lawyers take a cautious approach to AI, perhaps buying a small-scale license to test it before rolling AI out company wide.
AI for IP – Why or Why Not?
Though they are risk averse, IP professionals are still seeking out AI solutions. Why? The Report found that 77% are actively seeking ways to save time and costs, and 42% are interested in any tech that adds new efficiencies. Certainly, AI has the potential to accomplish these goals, though specialized AI solutions must be appropriately secure and customizable for IP legal teams, requiring startup investment. Initially, IP teams are likely to save more time than money with AI because they must pay for the right technology. Interestingly, the Report also found that 76% of IP professionals said AI adoption created a competitive advantage for IP professionals. Corporate boards and investors are continually pressing IP departments and outside counsel firms to do more with less. AI is a viable way to accomplish this goal because AI can lead to greater productivity and future-proof operations.
How AI Providers are Gradually Earning Trust from IP
IP professionals’ typical work process has included MS Word, PDF and even paper documents. In fact, it can be extremely disruptive for them to have AI tools do so many things they used to do themselves. AI challenges the typical workflow approach that IP lawyers have historically had.
The change AI brings about provokes a combination of fear and fantasy – fear that it will lead to unpleasant consequences mixed with fantasy that AI is magic and will solve all problems without much input.
Generative AI is ideally suited for a lot of routine tasks common to IP. However, AI must overcome IP’s formidable barriers of security, confidentiality, trust, and quality. After all, lawyers face heavy consequences for flawed legal work. Even if technology tools were the source of an error, the attorney is responsible.
Opportunity for AI usage among IP professionals depends on the problems they are addressing. For tasks such as machine translation, search, and analytics, people are keener to embrace AI because these tools have been around much longer and are widely trusted. However, when it comes to document drafting, infringement research, and claim charting – tasks which have traditionally required the IP lawyer’s expert touch – AI is still earning trust.
Perfecting AI
In IP, security, confidentiality and quality are all extremely important, which is why professionals are risk averse. They don’t want to trust AI unless it’s 100% perfect. To achieve this level of accuracy, keeping humans in the loop is incredibly important. AI solutions should support and enhance IP practitioners’ work, not replace them. Take language translation for example. When people use language translation AI solutions, they cannot trust the AI to be totally flawless without having a qualified person check and edit the results. For AI providers, it’s important to be careful to prevent potential bias, copyright, and hallucination issues — this entails extra work done by people to steer the technology in the right direction.
The Report respondents found several AI-related patent and trademark solutions yielded a workable first draft and produced “higher than expected” results. When AI performs a patent or trademark search, the results need to be verified. Many companies are doing some POC (proof of concept) testing with AI. They buy a pilot license to use for testing, then spend several months comparing the AI’s output against results from traditional manual methods. Only once the AI is performing at the same level is the organization confident enough to go into full production and buy a company-wide license.
AI – Here to Stay?
Is AI just a passing fascination? The 2025 survey said 45% of IP professionals believe AI technologies are an inevitable progression. AI solutions are available, and now it’s more a question of what AI will be used for, and how the tech suppliers will collaborate with clients to make the tools satisfy IP’s quest for perfection.
The Report found that 64% believed AI will forever transform the role of IP professionals. Once AI becomes more engrained in IP practice, several roles will shift to spend more time reviewing, checking and validating AI’s output. Auditing AI’s work, creating new kinds of data and interpretation of the results will become a vital new human skill. By embracing the new technologies today, IP practitioners will be in a better place to harness AI capabilities in the future.
Compliance is becoming an issue to address, and governments are beginning to regulate AI. Europe recently introduced AI laws, but most EU countries are not equipped to enforce them. Many of the EU countries had not even announced their regulators by the recent August 2nd deadline. Right now, there is no clear process for confirming the category of an AI system, so it’s mostly self-declaration. Plus, IP professionals do not know which public body will be responsible for judging and penalizing violation cases. At present, AI suppliers must navigate with trust negotiation between parties. Clearly the regulatory action for AI will take a while to substantially impact AI creation and use. To build trust among users, AI providers need to address the IP profession’s concerns about data security and confidentiality. While some standards exist to guide compliance in this area, there is a lack of established regulation in this space. For now, the onus will be on suppliers to carefully navigate the trust negotiation between parties while they wait for the regulatory system to catch up.
Transcending Beyond the AI Hype
Questel’s 2024 report was called “Beyond the Hype, How Tech is Transforming IP”, and in 2025, there is still hype but the tech companies serving IP now have many viable AI solutions which are specifically customized for IP law. AI use is steadily increasing – especially applying to routine, low-risk tasks – and the tech has a vibrant future in the IP sector. The process is gradual – IP professionals are still digesting and discovering how AI will change IP practice. They are enthusiastic about AI and see its many benefits, but their risk averse nature is tempering that forward momentum. However, IP departments and law firms must start expanding their use of AI tools to avoid being left behind by competitors that are leveraging its advantages.
The 2025 Report’s title “Pathways to Productivity” reflects how tech providers are striving to discover how AI can make IP professionals more productive, while safeguarding their trust at the same time. IP AI suppliers like Questel and others must build trust by addressing quality, security and confidentiality concerns, plus fulfilling IP’s desire for customized solutions. AI is at the very beginning of its journey to transform IP practice, and it will be exciting to see where the path to productivity will lead.
Benoit Chevalier, has been patents products strategy director at IP IT services and consulting company Questel for almost three years. He has also held roles at the company including global director of IP solution experts, subject matter expert and US director of consulting and services.