USPTO looks to AI agents to ease examiner workloads
ByEdward Graham,
Managing Editor, Nextgov/FCW
October 20, 2026 06:25 PM ET
The office’s Acting Commissioner for Patents Barry Schindler said putting agents in the hands of its examiners “can shorten that [review process] to one year, because you can pick up the phone and have conversations.”
Although agentic artificial intelligence systems are poised to help the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office significantly reduce the time it takes to review applications by streamlining rote tasks, a top official with the agency said the capabilities also have another added benefit — empowering skilled examiners to rely more on human-to-human interactions rather than the typical stream of impersonal correspondence.
Barry Schindler, USPTO’s acting commissioner for patents, said the agency currently has a diverse staff of patent reviewers, including PhD biochemists who review relevant patent applications. Rather than bogging these personnel down with tedious tasks during the three-step pre-exam, examination...
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