"Before the Draft" webinar on September 3 unites experts from IBM, Brandeis University, Canon, and Kodak Alaris

IP.com will sponsor a live webinar on September 3, 2026, at 12:00 PM ET, exploring key decisions that AI-assisted patent drafting often overlooks. Produced and hosted by IPWatchdog, "Before the Draft: Deciding What Is Worth Patenting in the AI Era" gathers IP leaders, inventors, and researchers for the discussion.

AI can now generate a polished patent application in minutes. That speed assumes the harder questions have already been answered: is the underlying invention novel and non-obvious enough to protect, and valuable enough to justify the cost of pursuing it.

AI can search, organize, and help frame the analysis, but it cannot replace informed human judgment. Even a novel, non-obvious invention may not be differentiated or commercially relevant enough to justify the cost of prosecution and portfolio maintenance.

"A confident, technically polished AI-generated application built around an idea that is not meaningfully new carries real downstream cost," said Joe Manico, research scientist at Kodak Alaris. "The goal is to catch that earlier."

The webinar walks through the four decision gates every invention passes through: concept, refinement, filing, and portfolio, with a focus on the earliest gates, which increasingly determine downstream value. Attendees will learn to distinguish a fluent AI-generated disclosure from an invention that is genuinely novel and potentially patentable, and how corpus-grounded, evidence-based analysis can produce patentability assessments that are scored, sourced, and traceable to the relevant patent record.

The panel spans the inventor's bench, the finance-of-innovation lens, and IP practice:

Enrico Monteleone, IBM Master Inventor and Support Engineer, IBM watsonx Orchestrate
Debarshi Nandy, Professor of Global Finance and Senior Associate Dean, Brandeis University School of Business and Economics
Sivon Kalminov, Director, Intellectual Property Division, Canon U.S.A., Inc.
Joe Manico, Research Scientist, Kodak Alaris

Gene Quinn, Founder and CEO of IPWatchdog, Inc., will moderate the discussion, with live audience Q&A to follow.

About IP.com

IP.com delivers corpus-grounded intelligence that helps inventors, R&D teams, and IP professionals evaluate novelty, strengthen IP strategy, and build durable competitive advantage. Our analytics, software, and expert services support scored, sourced, and defensible decisions from early concept evaluation through portfolio management.

Fortune 1000 enterprises, leading universities, and global law firms rely on IP.com to accelerate possibilities by turning evidence into IP decisions they can defend.

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SOURCE IP.COM, INC.