The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is betting that a strong cloud foundation will accelerate adoption of generative AI across the agency, with its in-house GenAI tool “Scout” now rolled out agencywide, acting Chief Information Officer (CIO) Debbie Stephens said on Thursday.
Speaking at GDIT’s Emerge: Modern Government event in Washington, Stephens said the agency’s multicloud environment is laying the groundwork for sustainable AI use.
“Right about now, we’re about 58% in the cloud; we’re across three different clouds,” Stephens said. “The cloud, it is the springboard. It’s the platform for AI. So, we aren’t trying to, I’ll just say, bolt on AI on a legacy platform, it’s just not going to work. It’s unsustainable.”
Cloud modernization made the USPTO’s internal GenAI tool possible, Stephens said. Employees are using the tool just as they would “in the ChatGPT space, but in our safe space,” she added.
“We have kind of a slow roll beta right now, probably around 2,000 to 3,000 users, but they are using [Scout] for the day-to-day tasks,” she said.
“We also have community spaces where they are using it to solve business problems … some of the key to adoption is showing that … immediate return to the business problem,” Stephens added. “I think that’s where we’re hoping to gather that momentum for not only early adopters, but the late bloomers.”
Former USPTO CIO Jamie Holcombe announced in August 2025 that Scout would roll out to the entire USPTO enterprise in October 2025.
Holcombe said that the agency put the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) into Scout so that new patent examiners can ask the GenAI tool questions about their procedures “without having to bother their supervisory patent examiner.”
“You can’t read 1,500 PDF pages and expect to know it. So, it’s a really good training tool,” Holcombe said, adding that it saves employees a lot of time.
In addition to Scout, the USPTO also has an AI-based image search tool known as DesignVision and an Automated Search Pilot Program to speed patent reviews.