This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we have a special conversation that was recorded at the end of our AI 2025 program in front of a live studio audience.  Joining me were Stephanie Curcio, Clint Mehall, and John Rogitz, who along with Wen Xie, make up the new IPWatchdog Advisory Committee. Each of these people have been long-time attendees at our events, they often speak on panels, they often written articles for us, and now they will help advise me with respect to programs and continue to provide content for IPWatchdog.com.

We begin our conversation by asking the panel if there was anything that they heard during our AI program that was surprising. Rogitz said it was a concerning change in tone from technologist Jason Allen Snyder who in years past was pumping the breaks on worry about AI, but this year talked about it using terms like "existential threat." Mehall also picked upon predictions from the technologists panel that AI could achieve consciousness in 13 to 15 years. Meanwhile Curcio focused in on quantum computing, which seems to be the future, but is difficult to grasp and may face an uncertain patent landscape. 

After spending time discussing patent prosecution strategy for AI, we next turn to data protection and trade secrets, which I personally think we didn’t spend enough time on this year and plan to spend more time on next year. To jumpstart this part of our conversation I set the table by saying that not all data is created equally. There is the data that is collected and imported into AI tools and processes, and what is particularly valuable is the insights from that data, which is a different form of data itself. So, I asked: What should do companies be doing? What are the best practices for identifying and protecting valuable data in the AI age?

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