FOR COMPANIES
When everyone sees the board, the edge is choosing.
AI has collapsed the cost of patent intelligence. The freedom-to-operate landscape that once cost more than a product’s first-year revenue is now a subscription. Every rival sees the same board. What stays scarce is the act no tool can perform: choosing where to play — and owning the bet.
What AI makes cheap: patent intelligence — FTO, landscaping, watching; drafting; filing; prosecution mechanics. Patent strategy — the how — is commoditising.
What stays scarce: IP strategy — the what. What to build, what to file, what to keep secret, what to publish defensively, what margin is worth defending. An AI can rank options; it cannot answer for outcomes. Accountability is why this judgment stays scarce — and cheap intelligence is symmetric: rivals see you coming, the landscape floods, and the premium on selection rises precisely as its inputs get cheaper..
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Reading a landscape — and seeing the white space others miss.
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Instrument selection across the full toolkit: patents, trade secrets, data and regulatory exclusivity, defensive publication, deliberate non-assertion.
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FTO risk calls under uncertainty, and the discipline to act on a board everyone can see.
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Portfolio judgment under adversarial, symmetric intelligence — filing only what you will work.
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Tool fluency that directs the intelligence rather than defers to it.
One skill, five readings: here, claim construction is strategic reading — what a rival’s claim actually forecloses.
Executive briefing for boards and leadership · IP-function design (your first IP hire is a strategist, not a filer) · cohort programmes for R&D, strategy and in-house teams · standing advisory for portfolio and white-space decisions.
Convert a technology position into a defensible market position.