To UT Austin, Tradespace is a “trusted member of the team” that makes meeting goals faster and easier

University of Texas at Austin is the United States’ 10th largest public university and boasts more than 130 programs related to research commercialization. Director of Intellectual Property Chun Kuo leads the team that oversees patent filing, prosecution, and maintenance for UT Austin within its broader Discovery to Impact organization.

Chun and Discovery to Impact started using Tradespace after looking for ways to expedite the creation of non-confidential summaries (NCSs), the first step in finding potential partners in industry for university IP.

How Tradespace beat out human alternatives to shorten a major project by 60%, from one year to 4 months

In 2024, Chun’s team had the goal of completing NCSs for their whole portfolio, something that was going to take 12 months with all hands on deck if the team hadn’t found a new solution.

To find a way to eliminate their backlog of non-confidential summaries, the team’s search began with external vendors but quickly expanded to include AI tools. To evaluate the options, Chun’s team made comparisons between the summaries returned by:

• Team members, the existing, capacity-constrained solution
• Vendors, whose NCSs they found to be too subjective
• Interns, who had been internally trained
• Tradespace, which performed beyond their expectations

Says Chun, “Tradespace consistently beat the work products that we’d get from prospective vendors. It gets us 60-70% of the way there by giving us the equivalent of an intern or team member’s first draft.” With Tradespace doing most of the work, NCS creation usually now only takes one of Chun’s team members minutes per invention, down from 30 to 60. Chun describes the time savings as significant, totalling more than 6-8 hours per week.

Using Tradespace, Chun’s team has created NCSs for almost the whole portfolio in just 3-4 months. “If it weren’t for Tradespace, I would’ve had to ask for more budget to hire more team members and I’d probably have more gray hair,” he remarks.

What Chun’s clients think about AI-generated NCSs and his team’s future plans for Tradespace

Even though his team’s only been using Tradespace for a short time, Chun’s already seen how it might have a long-term effect on client satisfaction, which he considers the team’s #1 priority. “Across the board, our professors, grad students, and inventors endorse and encourage Tradespace’s continued use,” he says. “They really appreciate our new turnaround time and can’t tell that their NCSs have been AI-generated. In most cases, they say the NCS says everything they would have said and don’t have any changes to make.”

Throughout the NCS project, Chun’s team was happy to discover that Tradespace doesn’t just summarize research in a concise and accurate manner. It also helps them automatically assign or review their IP classifications, subject areas like life sciences or computing that they previously did manually. With this capability, Chun’s team is planning to leverage Tradespace to create comprehensive marketing packages on top of its non-confidential summaries. Chun’s team is also exploring how Tradespace can automate and integrate more of their workflows, from disclosure to valuation: “We’re not done with Tradespace. As we continue to get more of our information into the platform, we’re hoping to have more informed discussions about each case — potential concerns or pitfalls and the best decision on how to proceed and invest.”

Because of the results it’s already delivered plus its potential to do even more, Chun says Tradespace has become a “trusted advisor and member of the team.”

Letting IP professionals be more creative, and strategic

With the NCS project done and Tradespace fully integrated into the NCS process, Chun reports that his team has shifted its focus to work that’s more strategic. “We’re able to spend a lot less time doing manual reviews, summaries, and characterizations, and more time on being well-informed and connected service providers who have time for the kind of conversations that break down barriers,” Chun exclaims. “Tradespace makes our lives easier and allows us to do more with quality. With AI, we can move beyond just maintaining our portfolio’s status quo and into growing it with the time we save.”

Chun’s message for IP is that change is never as bad or scary as we think. He recommends getting ahead of new technology by understanding how it works, its limitations, and how it fits into your day to day. To him, embracing AI makes special sense for the industry: “IP folks always feel overtaxed and stuck in maintenance mode. Tradespace lets you sit back so you can get your creative juices flowing and think differently. It gets you out from being behind the computer at your desk.”