Manish Sinha, the founder and CTO of patent research and analytics company PatSeer, recently told AIM that patent filers in India are leveraging AI and generative AI, drastically reducing the time needed to draft patents. Interestingly, this has directly contributed to an increase in the number of patents filed in India.
“AI has reduced the amount of time needed to draft patents by as much as 70%,” Sinha added, citing attorneys using generative AI to easily prepare a structure and all the key sections.
“Earlier, they had to start from zero and go to 100, but now, they’re able to start around 70 and take it to 100. Obviously, fine-tuning is still required, since AI is not going to perfectly draft it the way the inventor wants. But, it’s a significant timesaver,” Sinha said.
And save time it does. With ‘Make In India’ still a core tenet fuelling the Indian ecosystem, patent filing has seen a massive surge in the last year alone. Besides, with the Indian Patent Office publishing the Patents (Amendment) Rules, 2024, allowing patent filing to become more streamlined, the number of patents filed between March 2023 and March 2024 reached over one lakh.
According to Sinha, the change in the rules and researchers prioritising patenting signify India’s growing ability to compete with global players.
India’s Innovation Sector Set to Improve?
Recently, Padma Shri awardee TV Mohandas Pai implied that the reason why India was lacking in the innovation sector was a disinterest in patenting our inventions.
“Many patents attributed to Western companies are the result of work conducted in India, However, these patents are registered under the names of Western companies due to the global operations,” he said.
Comparing India to the US, he said that American researchers prioritise patent filing for larger strategic reasons rather than for immediate utility. Meanwhile, the need for filing patents in India is considered a hindrance rather than a priority.
Acknowledging the same, Sinha said that as the ecosystem in India changes towards an urgent need to compete in the global patent race, the tides seem to be turning.
“This is not just the filings in India, this is Indian people also filing internationally. Whereas traditional sectors in India used to be purely pharmaceutical and biotechnology, this has extended to smaller fields of science. It is in EV research, automotives, and green tech, with a lot of startups filing patents. It’s gone beyond just biopharma,” Sinha told AIM.
He also mentioned that a majority of patent filers use AI for their research work.
Patseer helps in the research phase of patent filing as a platform that allows for patent research and analysis using AI-enabled and expert search functionalities for patent researchers and filers. Sinha describes it as “a Bloomberg for patents”, drawing a comparison to Bloomberg Terminal.
He said that the use of AI means that large amounts of data can be scoured to ensure that patent filings aren’t repeated. Additionally, it helps cut out the tedious parts of patent research, offering insights based on the information it takes in.
While Sinha said that there are no hallucinations, as it is looking for and generating very specific information, there can be issues of false positives, which cannot be entirely eradicated. “But the aim is to reach as close to 100% as it can,” he said.
On the Government Side
Sinha revealed that the Indian Patent Office also made use of Patseer’s services to further expedite the patent filing process using AI.
“Patseer is used for examination in the Indian Patent Office. They are a client of ours. Almost all examiners use Patseer for their patent searches on a daily basis. They have also upgraded their internal software systems to speed things up,” Sinha said.
Apart from this, as mentioned before, the office’s amendment of the Patent Rules means a more streamlined process. Included in the amended rules are a reduced timeline for examinations, an increased grace period for filing patents (giving researchers 12 months to file a patent from the time of invention), and lower fees and discounts.
All of these encourage Indian researchers to prioritise patenting their inventions, removing some aspects of unnecessary bureaucracy that hinder the ability of international patenters to take advantage of indigenous research.
Additionally, the overall embracing of AI, including generative AI, from both the governance and research side means that patent filing in India could continue to grow exponentially.
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