2026 AI Predictions: Agentic Workflows Will Define IP Management

By Rohit Saluja, Head of AI at Anaqua

 

For many years, conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) in intellectual property suggested that eventually IP professionals would have to worry about whether their jobs were at risk of being taken over by AI. As we enter 2026, AI is instead poised to accelerate how IP professionals are able to do their jobs better on a daily basis; however, AI will not completely replace them, nor their legal judgement.

In fact, 2026 will be a defining year for agentic workflows; automated and driven by AI but working closely alongside the power of human oversight and decision-making. Acting as a force multiplier, these workflows don’t remove IP professionals from the process but instead are allowing teams to shift away from labour‑intensive administrative tasks. This enables highly skilled attorneys, patent specialists, and paralegals to continue working on higher‑value activities, such as portfolio decisions, risk assessment and supporting innovators more directly.

While AI agents are increasingly being deployed in IP, it’s key to differentiate between agentic AI and agentic workflows. The former removes humans from the equation, while the latter incorporates human oversight. In IP law, where a missed deadline results in the loss of rights, the 'human-in-the-loop' is not just a feature, it is a liability shield. Agentic workflows respect this reality by keeping the human expert as the ultimate gatekeeper. IP processes don’t allow room for error, and until AI is able to complete tasks autonomously with 100% accuracy, agentic workflows will provide opportunities for increasing efficiency while balancing that with the accuracy that comes from a human review of outputs.

 

Automating the Noise: The Evolution of Docketing

Docketing has long been one of the most time‑consuming responsibilities in the IP profession. Much of this task complexity comes from the unstructured nature of the materials that AI is picking through. Files come in different varieties such as foreign office documents, email communications and scanned attachments, all written in inconsistent formats. This has typically meant that only humans with expert experience could interpret and file these documents.

Tools with which professionals can docket using AI were introduced in 2025, but AI’s continued improvement in reasoning over unstructured legal text is driving the next meaningful shift. Models are continuing to develop their ability to extract deadlines, identify important dates (e.g., “three months from the mailing date”), and flagging potentially relevant events hidden deep within complex documents.

This is partially due to hallucination levels having decreased as models become more refined. This does not make tasks such as docketing entirely autonomous, instead, this is another example of trust‑but‑verify workflows, where AI handles the first pass and IP professionals confirm accuracy. Many teams will experience a tangible reduction in manual data entry, with AI extracting key fields and proposing updates that humans validate.

The result is a shift in responsibility, as professionals move from spending hours analysing PDFs to reviewing AI‑extracted information, maintaining quality assurance. Once in theory, now in reality, this means higher consistency, fewer oversights, and more time spent on creatively problem-solving portfolio issues.

 

Inventor Portals Become Key Tools

The processes involved in pre-filing remain some of the most variable steps within the innovation lifecycle. Inventors may find themselves struggling with complex forms, inconsistent detail and the burden of ensuring that the administrative stages of the process are completed with the right supporting information.

As part of this, a focus for AI in the industry may become inventor portals, and how these can be designed, with AI tools, to help support the capture of ideas in a more streamlined and time-efficient manner. For example, if inventors are trying to brainstorm ideas, they may then be laboured with filling out numerous forms that hinder the wider creative process.

AI tools are already capable of listening to conversations. In the same way technology is able to produce meeting transcripts, AI can already produce notes from conversations or planning sessions. However, what comes next is using the predictive power of AI to take those notes and automatically begin to use the information to complete the next necessary steps of the journey. In theory, these portals would store all of this information, capturing the entire creative process, as well as going on to draft initial summaries based on discussions, prompt for missing details, and generate more structured disclosures that attorneys and innovation managers can refine.

One major opportunity is the integration of AI‑powered prior‑art signals within the portal experience. While completing prior-art checks is part of the standardized workflow across the industry, there are some creators that, depending on policy and access to external sources, only complete prior-art checks against their own portfolio. This opens up teams to expending energy in the wrong directions or failing to identify potentially promising concepts sooner. These are the areas where dedicated inventor portals have the opportunity to close gaps in the inventing process.

 

Translation and Terminology Memory Improve Collaboration

The needs for translation in IP management are not only complex but cover two different definitions of translation. Converting not only foreign languages into a perceivable text, but also technical translation, where complex industry-specific terminology is converted into phrasing that is easily understood by entire teams.

Across the creative process, staff of different backgrounds may be required to process the documentation that supports a product. And while translation can not only prove a time delay within the workflow; failure to properly understand the complications of filings, office actions and supporting technical materials, can lead to incorrect filings.

While machine translation has improved significantly in recent years, tools within AI’s capability can take this further, creating a consistently reliable, and more cost and time efficient option to human translations.

The major obstacle that is being traversed in this step is the incorporation of translation memory and organization‑specific terminology alignment that ensures consistent treatment of technical terms, product names, and invention-specific phrasing.

AI translation alone cannot yet guarantee legal accuracy across every jurisdiction, and human review will remain essential for high‑risk or nuanced materials. However, with the global dependency of IP, AI’s increasing ability to conceptualise slang and non-standard terms is making it possible for professionals to rely entirely on in-programme translation.

In practice, this means foreign filing workflows become smoother and less dependent on access to translation, while still achieving nuanced and accurate quality at the first pass, so that attorneys can spend more time on interpretation rather than correcting basic terminology.

 

IP Leaders Gain Greater Visibility into Portfolio Health

Many heads of IP feel as though they have difficulties accessing real-time insights into their portfolios, as they look to understand where filings are concentrated, how costs are trending, and where delays, risks, or inefficiencies may appear.

AI‑enabled dashboards and forecasting tools will make these insights more accessible in 2026, analysing not just what's going on, but even helping to predict why, and in turn, how to avoid or benefit from similar trends in the future. This is helping heads of IP to make more reliable decision-making around budgeting, renewals and geographic strategy.

Executives will benefit from shorter time‑to‑insight and improved scenario planning, as the forecasting is being done by the tools built into the IPMS system. Versus using outside technology, having in-built tools to complete these sorts of insight-heavy tasks is improving the workflow and helping teams to have a clearer understanding of how their portfolio aligns with business objectives.

 

2026: The Year of the Agentic Workflow

In 2025, the common word after AI was ‘agents’. A set of AI tools that could take information and begin to run the day-to-day work by itself. By 2026, the industry has already moved past that way of thinking. IP professionals, as the experience and skill in the workflow, must continue to be paired with automation, to ensure what is being produced meets the standards of human-made content.

“Agentic workflows” will use automation to complete tasks of growing complexity, but will not allow AI to run wild, constantly facing the checks and balances of IP professionals to provide
expertise, legal responsibility, and human judgement.

Docketing will become faster, inventor portals could capture more complete ideas, translation workflows gain consistency, all while human oversight remains essential.

The future of AI in IP is integrated and guided by IP experts. The organizations that succeed in 2026 will be those that adopt AI correctly and empower their professionals to focus on high value work that can never be replaced: the creativity and ingenuity of human intelligence.

 

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