The Indian founder relied on AI for patent analysis and usage even before the ChatGPT hype.
(Photo: Private)
Tokyo How can artificial intelligence (AI) bring real benefits to business? India series founder Komal Talwar has been working on this question for a long time. She and her team have been working on generative AI for years, launching it in their service XLScout before the hype surrounding ChatGPT.
Their goal is to refine and incorporate the latest AI techniques such as large language models, so that the results are actually usable by the company. So far, the problem has often been that the results of these programs contain too many errors, explained an engineer in charge of AI analysis at a Japanese chemical company. “For example, 80 percent accuracy in identifying chemical formulas doesn’t help us.” Ideally, the accuracy should be 100 percent.
But in order to get the last percentage out of the system, the cooperation of experts and AI experts is necessary. As a result, many companies specializing in specific industrial applications have sprung up in this field.
The entrepreneur told Handelsblatt that the most important thing is that companies and suppliers define exactly the problems and tasks they want to solve. At least one theme was obvious to them: patents. “We want to democratize their analysis and use,” Talwar explained. She recently gave a keynote address at Tokyo business newspaper Nikkei’s AI Summit on how the technology is being used in companies today.
Active in this field is her company, TT Consultants, which claims to have more than 250 employees with expertise in various industries. Has been serving many clients worldwide for 17 years. The 44-year-old is now starting where it used to be very complicated and expensive. One of the tasks was to automate patent validation to reduce the high rejection rate of almost 50%.
The service should also help generate new ideas from one’s own patents. Another point is the monetization of idle patents, for example by detecting patent infringements or products that may be interested in their own patents. The latest idea is to have AI write patents.
Canadian Studies and Indian Expertise
To achieve this goal, Talwar left India to start XLScout in the US and base the company’s growth in one of the world’s leading technology hubs: Canada. “This country is a rising star in AI,” Talwar said. “We work closely with the universities and professors there.”
The partnership gave her access to staff and the latest AI technologies, which she was then able to optimize using the expertise of Indian consultants in various sectors including automotive, steel and chemicals. The Indian woman said she was also able to take advantage of state subsidies. “We become part of an ecosystem that then helps us develop our product.”
Experts do not rely on one technique, but use different methods depending on the problem. The team uses an open-source language model and then feeds the model with an industry-specific database. The system provides access to more than 150 million patents and more than 200 million professional articles.
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“In some places, they already work very well, but in others, they still need fine-tuning,” Talwar said. In other cases, tasks are accomplished through supervised or unsupervised machine learning or natural language processing.
At first, the proposal wasn’t sure to succeed. “It’s been a difficult task for us to explain to people what AI can do in different use cases,” Talwar said. “But in the past year, ChatGPT has suddenly made our jobs a lot easier because now everyone wants to use generative AI.”
This also includes German customers. She now wants to open her own office in Munich for them. Talwar has had an agency in Japan for some time.
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