The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has launched more than 20 artificial intelligence (AI) applications, focusing on a “people first” approach in which AI assists human employees, a top USPTO official said on Sept. 23.
“Our AI is rooted in the philosophy where the [patent] examiner leads, and AI is a supportive assistant,” USPTO Chief Information Officer (CIO) Deborah Stephens said at an American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) event.
“We have an enterprise adoption team that is helping us support our AI journey, and we put people at the center,” said Stephens, who added that the agency has launched an AI academy that helps employees implement the technology and has successfully rolled out an internal generative AI tool known as “Scout.”
Stephens spoke amid a broader debate over whether the U.S. should slow and potentially regulate the development of advanced AI systems, but she did not address those issues in her remarks.
She focused on AI deployments at USPTO, where she became acting CIO in August 2025 and took over the permanent role in June. Stephens had served as deputy CIO at USPTO since 2019.
The agency’s AI initiatives have included Scout and DesignVision, launched last year as the first AI-based image search tool available to design patent examiners via the Patents End-to-End (PE2E) search suite.
Stephens said officials are “super-happy” with the rollout of Scout, which is up to about 7,000 users on a daily and weekly basis and continues to grow.
She also highlighted a “very helpful” AI application that generates application summaries for patent examiners. In the few months since it was unveiled, it has generated more than 100,000 summaries and “just continues to grow exponentially,” Stephens said.