The IamIP Digital Patent Forum 2026 took place online on October 6th and 7th, with one edition in English and one in German. This year’s programme combined an external patent attorney’s perspective with sessions from the IamIP team. Topics included AI-powered patent search, patent review and claim analysis, collaboration, and smarter workflows.
The sessions were designed to show not only what the platform can do, but how its features can support real patent workflows. Here is a look at the highlights.
Morning: A New Way to Search and the Attorney’s View
We opened the forum with IamIP’s newest feature, then heard how patent intelligence works in daily practice with clients.
AI Search Suite: A New Way to Search Patents
Viktor Rudolf, CPO @ IamIP
IamIP’s CPO kicked off the day by introducing the AI Search Suite and showing how natural language and semantic similarity can support patent searching.
Viktor started with the problem it solves. The number of patent documents published every week keeps growing, patents are published in many languages, and the same invention can be described in very different words. Boolean search remains precise and gives full control, but it takes time and is hard to learn. AI search works on meaning instead of keywords. Every patent is converted into a mathematical representation based on its title, abstract and claims. Your description goes through the same process, and results are ranked by how close their meaning is to yours, across languages.
He showed four ways to use it: free-text AI search, similarity search starting from patent numbers, monitorings based on either, and hybrid search that combines AI with Boolean criteria such as applicant or date. One tip stood out: set up a similarity monitoring on your own most important patents to be alerted when a competitor files something very similar. On choosing between AI and Boolean search, he said there is no general rule, and in many cases the combination works best. For better results, describe the problem, solution and components in full technical sentences, and leave out Boolean operators. He also confirmed that search queries never leave IamIP’s ISO-certified data centers and that no customer data is used to train AI models.
A Patent Attorney’s Perspective: Using Patent Intelligence in Practice
Max Feucker, Patent Attorney for Technology-Based SMEs
We were happy to welcome this year’s guest speaker, Max Feucker. A patent attorney with a background in physics and more than 13 years of practice, Max helps mid-sized technology companies turn patent administration into IP strategy. He shared how patent intelligence tools support his everyday work with clients, including patent monitoring and freedom to operate (FTO), and gave a practical view of IamIP in real-world workflows.
Many of Max’s clients have small or no patent departments, and he supports them across the whole patent cycle. Monitoring results used to reach them as Excel lists or PDFs, which did not give decision-makers all the information they needed. Today, each client has its own organization on IamIP, which Max manages himself. He builds the monitoring strategy together with the client and shares the results on the platform. For some clients, he adds a pre-assessment as comments right next to each patent. Discussions about a patent take place and stay documented on the platform, which reduces emails. For FTO opinions, he records his first assessment on the platform and then shares the portfolio so clients can review it patent by patent.
In the Q&A, Max explained that monitoring flags a newly granted patent with a problematic scope at least twice a year, giving clients the chance to file an opposition. He combines classic and AI search to get the advantages of AI with the certainty of the classic approach.
Afternoon: From Patent Review to Team Workflows
In the afternoon, our Customer Success team took a closer look at how different IamIP capabilities can be used in practice.
From Monitoring to Analysis: An AI-Powered Patent Review Workflow
Serhat Altun, Customer Success Manager @ IamIP
Serhat followed a patent through the review process, starting with monitoring, then summarizing the document and using AI tools to clarify and compare claims. The session showed how different AI capabilities can work together in one workflow.
His starting point: collecting patent data is no longer the problem. Turning it into decisions is, and many of those decisions are made outside the IP department, in R&D, management, product management and sales. In his workflow, monitoring delivers new filings every week. The AI Patent Categorizer and AI Patent Tagger then sort them by relevance and technology so they reach the right team. The AI Patent Summarizer gives a technical summary and the invention’s key advantages. The AI Claim Clarifier explains claim terms based on the patent’s own description, and the AI Claim Comparer shows how claims differ across a patent family and countries.
AI won’t be right every time and doesn’t replace reading the patent, but it takes much of the manual work away. Ideally, AI supports the workflow a team already has rather than adding work. His advice was to start small, with one colleague or one monitoring, and then scale.
Better Workflows & Collaboration: Connecting Teams, Data & Rules
Stefan Jorias, Team Lead Customer Success & Patent Professional @ IamIP
The forum closed with Stefan showing how IamIP’s collaboration and workflow features can help teams work together more effectively and manage patent information.
Stefan started from a familiar problem. When reviews involve too many manual steps, work piles up and important documents can slip through. In IamIP, teams share documents, portfolios and monitorings with the right access rights and always work on the same live data. Smart Rules then automate the routine. Tags, star rankings, dropdown menus and AI relevance flags act as triggers to move or copy documents, share them, create tasks or activate Legal Status Watch.
In a live demo, he automated a review workflow between an IP department and an R&D team. A pre-assessment sent documents to R&D for review or to an archive. R&D’s ratings then routed each document to the right portfolio, and the most critical ones automatically received Legal Status Watch and a follow-up task for the IP team. Each assessment became a single click, while all automated actions stay documented and traceable. The result: teams stay in sync, criteria are applied consistently and nothing gets overlooked.
Thank You
A big thank you to everyone who joined us in English and in German. We look forward to seeing you at our upcoming webinars and at next year’s Patent Forum.
Special thanks to our guest speaker:
Max Feucker
And to the IamIP team:
Viktor Rudolf, Serhat Altun, Stefan Jorias
