Built to Lead in the AI-Native Era of IP

Four essential questions for choosing an AI-Powered Partner 

 By Justin Crotty, CEO, Anaqua 

"How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” 

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926 

 

 

For legal tech, the “gradual” change started with the release of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 three-and-a-half years ago.  Legal practitioners slowly began using models to assist in their practice of law, directly or via vendors with new AI-driven features. The results were mixed. 

The “sudden” change occurred three-and-a-half weeks ago when the market digested Anthropic’s announcement of its Cowork AI agent. All at once the question became: How disruptive will AI agents ultimately be?  And what does this mean for the fundamental value proposition of the legal tech industry? 

For those of us working in the intellectual property (IP) space, we’ve always thought it to be protected because it is a distinct and highly specialized domain within the legal landscape. IP practitioners possess unique qualifications, deep legal technical experience, and even a specialized vocabulary. The complexity of IP management, governed by global rules, the high value of the underlying assets, and the significant consequences of getting it wrong, have long reinforced this sense of specialization. 

Before moving into the IP space 10 years ago, when I joined Anaqua, I spent my career advising investors and operators in various industries and businesses. I helped them navigate waves of change including client server ⮕ browser, on-prem ⮕ hosted, domestic ops ⮕ global ops, and public funding ⮕ private equity.  Although each of these precedents was a dramatic shift, I can tell you, the wave of change from AI hits different. And IP is not immune. 

The change from Agentic AI, in particular, is not just technological, it is operational, architectural, and strategic. As Agentic AI reshapes the IP landscape at extraordinary speed, every organization managing IP assets must ask four critical questions when choosing a partner to jointly navigate this new era. 

 

1. Does the IP vendor have financial staying power? 

This one is existential. 

An IP management software solution is the system of record for IP, housing confidential information, configured with proprietary workflows and interfaces.  For vendors also managing annuities, renewals, and filings, there is also a large volume of cash flowing through the vendor to fund PTO official fees.  Managing IP is a critical function that necessitates a trusted partner that is financially strong for the long run and well-positioned to invest and grow to meet evolving market and customer needs. 

Since the release of GPT-3.5, every subsequent foundation model has expanded the frontier of actions that AI can reliably perform. We do not yet know how far upstream into true executive function agentic models will ultimately go. But we do know this: certain areas of IP are squarely in the sweet spot for AI already in production. 

Vendors whose business models depend heavily on these disintermediated functions are facing mounting revenue and margin pressure. When AI commoditizes a revenue stream, vendors built around that stream face structural pressure, which leads to reduced investment capacity precisely when customers need accelerated innovation. This pressure simultaneously erodes their ability to innovate and maintain strong service levels across the rest of their portfolio of solutions. So what functions, business models and capital structures are most at risk? 

 

Information Selling 

Industries disrupted by AI have already learned a clear lesson: when models can extract, summarize, normalize, and identify patterns at scale, pure information selling stops being a defensible business model. Historically, high-margin information businesses were anchored around building proprietary data repositories and adding value through tagging, normalization, and analysis. This model persisted because the data was difficult and expensive to acquire and required editorial skill to curate. AI has accelerated the commoditization curve, and IP is no exception. In fact, IP is even more exposed: because IP assets derive their value from being public (with trade secrets being the obvious counterexample), it’s all accessible for AI agents to harvest. Truly proprietary IP datasets that remain insulated from long-term AI-driven devaluation are now extremely rare. Consequently, owning data is no longer enough. Intelligence must be embedded into execution. Products that sit adjacent to workflows will continue to lose relevance to platforms that power the workflows themselves. 

 

Translation Services 

Just before writing this post, I joined a call with Northern European colleagues. The discussion involved complex technical concepts, so participants preferred speaking in their native language. I turned on real-time interpretation in our meeting software and listened seamlessly, complete with an emulated version of each speaker’s voice. 

For written translation, the technology is even further ahead. 

We are already working with clients who use AI-generated translations as the primary source for their IP-related translation needs, with human service providers or attorneys performing only the final pass. The result is 90% cost reductions with no noticeable decline in quality. 

This level of disruption is not theoretical. It’s happening. 

More broadly, AI is collapsing the economic foundation of labor-intensive service layers. Platforms dependent on human arbitrage rather than architectural advantage will find their margins and relevance compressed. 

 

Venture Capital Funding 

Many early-stage companies in IP are reliant on funding from venture investors.  Venture funds invest in a large portfolio of companies and are happy to subsidize operating losses for the prospect of achieving exponential growth with a small number of their invested companies. Over time, and in aggregate, this has worked splendidly for venture investors, it does not, however, always work out well for the invested companies and their end-customers.  If growth slows, investors lose interest and shift resources elsewhere. As someone who lived through the dotcom era, venture funding is fickle. To rely on a vendor that is reliant on venture funding for a mission-critical function such as IP is to put your business at risk. Mission-critical infrastructure requires permanence, not optionality held by an external stakeholder. 

 

Anaqua’s Position 

At Anaqua, we’ve always believed that effectively managing IP requires much more than selling information or translation. While we own and operate AcclaimIP for patent analytics, it represents a small portion of our total revenue. More importantly, the strategic value of AcclaimIP lies in embedding analytics within the broader context of our IP management platform. We also support AI-powered translations within our IP software, but we do not run an in-house IP translation business. That was a deliberate choice, and one aligned with the realities of how AI is reshaping the market.  

Anaqua has been profitable for twenty years and is not reliant on venture funding to subsidize operating losses. Our acquisition by Nordic Capital in 2025 gives us additional financial strength to continue investing aggressively in innovation and long-term market leadership. 

 

2. Can the vendor adapt to the AI-driven transformation of IP work?

Earlier generations of IP systems were built around deterministic, step-by-step workflows, to codify the precise rules for obtaining and managing IP assets. These systems later evolved to include embedded analytics and decision support capabilities. While vast improvements over disjointed solutions, these tools still required human interpretation to bridge the gap from activity to decision.  

Today, we are entering a new phase in which AI is capable of wholly automating workflows, such as docketing, classification and case triage. In the new paradigm, coordinated AI agents handle the operational tasks, while human experts oversee and step in where they can add the most value such as reviewing, validating, and guiding the system’s outcomes. And ahead lies an even more dramatic shift: a future where AI agents, not humans, originate and drive workflows, escalating only exceptions, questions, or approvals for human oversight. In this virtual agent-driven model, user roles shift from task or workflow execution to governance, demanding entirely new UX patterns, controls, and system behaviors.  

Early in my career I implemented CRM and sales automation systems as a technology consultant. These systems are great at organizing information and give a head start for building applications by piggybacking on foundational infrastructure. However, building an IP management platform on a CRM platform is fundamentally restrictive. CRM vendors express an opinion in their architecture that introduces an additional layer of cost and control that limits flexibility to embrace new technology rapidly. Architectures built for customer relationship management were never designed for autonomous, agent-driven execution of highly confidential legal workflows. The constraints become visible precisely when AI demands architectural freedom.    

The character of IP work is changing fast, and it requires a modern IP management system that’s engineered to evolve as fast as AI does. The future IP system will not be a workflow tool with AI features. It will be an AI-native operating system where intelligent agents originate, coordinate, and optimize workflows with humans governing the system rather than executing each step.

 

Anaqua’s Position 

Anaqua was the pioneer of embedding analytics into IP software workflows ten years ago and is well-positioned to lead the next wave of agentic transformation. Anaqua’s IP management system is based on a purpose-built architecture engineered explicitly for the confidentiality, complexity, UX, and compliance requirements of IP.  

We intentionally avoided building our platform on a CRM based system. By maintaining an IP management platform that’s designed from the ground up for IP, sensitive data stays isolated from external LLMs, and our full-stack control lets us deploy agentic AI workflows quickly and responsibly. 

In May 2025, with the backing of Nordic Capital, we acquired RightHub, which had developed the first AI-native IP Management software platform. We now have a suite of AI features and a team of AI experts partnering with our enterprise-grade product and engineering experts. The acquisition of RightHub marked a structural shift toward AI-native architecture. By combining RightHub’s AI-first foundation with Anaqua’s enterprise-grade IP platform and global execution network, we are building the industry’s first AI-native IP operating system. Our combined team is dedicated to building the future of AI-driven IP solutions. 

We fundamentally believe that in an era of rapid change, you need to have sophisticated in-house talent and own your platform to control your destiny. We own our stack, our data boundaries, and our AI roadmap. That independence allows us to move faster and more responsibly than vendors constrained by third-party platforms and fragile capital structures. 

 

3. How strong, scalable, and secure is the vendor’s infrastructure?

Before publication, the information that becomes an IP right represents the most confidential information an organization owns. This is equally true for law firms entrusted to act on behalf of rightsholder clients. Safeguarding this information requires absolute confidentiality and therefore complete control over interactions with contributory LLMs, even as companies look to enable governed, auditable AI-driven workflows. 

Unlike consumer AI tools, enterprise IP systems must operate under strict regulatory and compliance obligations, meet rigorous certifications, handle massive and continuous data flows, support decadeslong retention, and tolerate zero failure.  

AI is fundamentally reshaping how IP work is performed, from prescreening disclosures and routing workflows to analyzing prior art, drafting responses, and automating large parts of prosecution and maintenance. This new era requires a modern platform capable of evolving its UX, data architecture, and workflow engine at the pace AI is advancing. AI transformation is not a feature upgrade. It is a platform evolution. Vendors constrained by aging architectures or ungoverned data models will struggle to deliver secure, governed agentic workflows at enterprise scale  

 

Anaqua’s Position 

Anaqua’s AI capabilities enable IP teams to automate highvalue workfows, from docketing to classification to global brand protection.  

Anaqua has invested heavily in industry-leading hosting infrastructure, security, and controls. This is evidenced by our ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, and ISO 9001 certifications, which validate the rigor of our global security program and information management practices. For enterprise clients, our hosting environment is powered by Microsoft Azure, which provides a robust global cloud architecture, single-tenant hosting for maximum isolation, AES256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.2 encryption in transit, secure file transfer, and 24×7 operational support with rapid uptime recovery across multiple backup centers.  

For clients managing highly sensitive or export-controlled U.S. data, we offer AnaquaGov as an additional layer of protection. AnaquaGov delivers secure U.S.-only staffing and infrastructure for managing Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and aligns with Department of Defense cybersecurity requirements. The AnaquaGov enclave has been independently assessed against NIST SP 800-171 controls. We offer similar export control functionality for various other jurisdictions around the world.  

 

4. How strong is the vendor’s ecosystem, and do they have the global network and expertise required to ensure seamless execution? 

After publication, an IP asset shifts from information that derives its value from being secret to being a public right whose value depends on being visible to authorities, competitors, and markets worldwide. Supporting this transformation requires an IP vendor that can transition IP assets effortlessly from strict confidentiality to global distribution, collaboration, and high-volume transactional execution. 

IP management is, by nature, a globally interdependent system, a living network of people, processes, and platforms. An IP management system, therefore, must act as the coordinating hub across corporate IP teams, outside counsel, PTO systems, translation engines, paralegal operations, payment workflows, and now virtual AI agents. The value of any IP management system multiplies when these participants are seamlessly connected. Disconnected point solutions cannot replicate the compounding intelligence created by a unified platform orchestrating the full IP lifecycle. Without that network, automation is brittle and incomplete. 

At the same time, AI does not eliminate the need for deep expertise. AI agents can automate tasks, but they cannot replace decades of jurisdiction-specific knowledge, prosecution nuance, compliance requirements, PTO procedures, or the operational choreography required to manage global portfolios. A credible IP provider must understand the entire lifecycle and guide clients through it as AI reshapes the work. Technology alone is insufficient, expertise ensures accuracy, compliance, and long-term value.  

 

Anaqua’s Position  

Throughout our history, Anaqua has operated one of the most complex IP networks in the world: connecting human agents, global PTOs, outside counsel, supporting systems (e.g., HR, matter management, and document management), payment and docketing operations, and now virtual AI agents. While the network continues to expand and evolve, Anaqua’s central role as the coordinating hub in the ecosystem remains constant. 

Complementing this network is Anaqua’s global team of IP specialists, bringing decades of real-world expertise across prosecution, filing and renewal rules, portfolio strategy, and operations. AI may change how work gets done, but it only increases the need for seasoned oversight. Clients still need guidance, validation, compliance assurance, and trusted execution across the IP lifecycle, and that is exactly where Anaqua excels. 

Today, Anaqua is trusted by nearly half of the top 100 U.S. patent filers, leading global brands, and an expanding number of law firms worldwide. 

 

A Final Thought 

Succeeding in the practice and management of IP in the AI era requires a vendor who has the right architecture, expertise, and ecosystem and will persist. Anaqua’s purpose-built system of record, global IP expertise, and deeply connected network of human and virtual agents directly address each of these requirements. 

The next decade of IP management will not be defined by who owns the most data nor who offers the lowest-cost services. It will be defined by who delivers the most intelligent, secure, and adaptive IP platform. Our clients steward the world’s most valuable and complex IP portfolios. Our DNA is rooted in software and IP, with deep domain expertise, shaped by close collaboration with the world’s leading IP custodians. We are guided by a relentless focus on protecting and maximizing the value of these intangible assets. 

Most transformations accumulate in the background, until they assert themselves, loudly. We’ve seen this pattern before. AI is a louder and stronger wave, but the path to thriving in its wake is not different.  

Anaqua is committed to navigating through this transformational wave with our current and future clients. We have the experience, tools, and people. We are purpose-building for an AI-native future. And we are not going anywhere.