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Qthena recently introduced a new user interface, giving IP professionals greater flexibility in how they interact with its AI and access its specialized tools, all while keeping quality at the heart of its approach.
At Qthena Connect in Copenhagen, we spoke with Qthena’s founder, Tony Afram, about the platform’s origins, its evolving vision, and the opportunities and challenges ahead as agentic AI gains momentum.
From data security and transparency to accuracy and human oversight, we explore how Qthena’s relentless pursuit of quality is shaping its approach to more powerful, reliable, and controlled AI-powered IP workflows.
What inspired Qthena's creation?
One of the reasons we created Qthena was that, in our daily work, we experienced many of the same challenges ourselves. Before founding Qthena, I was a Chief IP Counsel, and we saw a lot of pain points, both in-house and from our previous experience working at law firms.
We really wanted to solve those problems. Our goal was to provide a single solution that offers all the tools and insights you need to complete a particular workflow. We didn't believe in a fragmented environment because, in our experience, you always needed several different tools to get the job done. We thought there had to be a better way, and that's why we started working on this.
Today, we're sometimes perceived as pioneers because we entered the market early. It's encouraging to see that people recognize the problem we set out to solve. People had always taken it for granted that they needed to log in to six different tools, right? Now, they realize, "Oh, there's a better way of doing this." I think that's why we're now seen as pioneers.
We started working on this before all the hype began. I sometimes joke, "It's good to be old!" We've been here for many, many years, long before all the hype we're currently seeing in the industry. I think our experience is a real advantage for our users because we understand these challenges so well. That's been a real benefit to us.
Why is Qthena introducing a new user interface now ?
When we first started out, we provided a user interface and experience designed to help people become more productive. Back then, the big buzzwords were productivity and big data.
We created a tool that could support all your workflows, and we always wanted to build a future-proof solution.
Over the last couple of years, of course, everything has shifted toward AI. To support these new use cases more quickly and easily, we're introducing a new user experience. We'll remain true to the project-based approach we pioneered.
People who regularly need to open and reopen 20 or 30 PDFs no longer have to do that, thanks to our project-based approach. So, of course, that functionality will stay.
At the same time, we're giving users more choice. If they simply want to come in and chat or use AI, we're giving them quicker access to the high-quality tools we've been providing for years as part of the Qthena solution.
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What does agentic AI mean for intellectual property?
There's obviously a lot of talk about agentic AI these days. The way we approach it, and what it really means to us, is that you can create a workflow that integrates multiple AI agents, or AI instances, each with different skills. For example, one agent might draft the claims, another might conduct the search, and a third might prepare a patentability report. These are three different AI agents that we connect in an agentic workflow.
For us, quality is everything. We need to deliver high-quality results and maximize the user's experience. We don't believe that, in the long term, you can achieve this by simply leaving it to an AI orchestrator to decide how many agents to deploy. It might decide to launch three AI agents today and eight next week. That's not how you achieve consistently high quality.
In our experience, we've been one of the first companies in the world to work with AI skills, starting back in 2023. At the time, people told us, "Oh, you're making it difficult." But now, everyone is working with AI skills, and we believe it was the right approach to achieving high quality.
We're taking the same approach to agentic AI. We'll design teams of AI agents that work together using the best tools on the market.
We can integrate high-quality tools from the Questel ecosystem, including Orbit with its Sophia Agent for patent search, and Markify. We'll give each AI agent the most relevant data at the right time to complete a workflow that we control from beginning to end, ensuring consistent results.
Rather than leaving things to chance and relying on a general-purpose AI tool that might deploy three agents one week and eight the next, we're taking that uncertainty out of the equation with our approach.
As agentic AI evolves, Qthena remains focused on turning technological advances into practical, reliable solutions for the IP community.
Discover how Qthena helps IP professionals bring AI into their everyday workflows, explore our resources.
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