Augmentation, Not Replacement: AI at America’s Innovation Agency, feat. Jamie Holcombe, CIO of the USPTO

Ivanti's recent research showed that IT workers are significantly more likely than other office workers to be anxious about the impact of AI on their jobs. IT workers are eight times more likely to say that the main beneficiaries of AI are employers rather than employees! Yet, IT workers also report record levels of burnout, which AI and automation have the potential to alleviate.​  

Rather than a feared future replacement, could AI actually be the powerful partner IT needs to do more and lower the risk of burnout? 

Jamie Holcombe, CIO of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) joins host Jeff Abbott to explain how adopting AI modernized how the USPTO did business across an enormous scale and led to a cultural and digital transformation of their IT operations.  

About the research 

For Ivanti’s Digital Employee Experience (DEX) research series we surveyed 16,200 IT professionals, executives and end users around the world, across a broad range of industries, to gauge their opinions on the current state and future of the digital employee experience (DEX). 

See all Ivanti’s original research at ivanti.com/research. 

About the guest 

Henry (Jamie) Holcombe is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In this role, he is the principal advisor on the development and operations of its information systems and technology. Noted accolades include winning the agency’s first “CIO 100” award for strides in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Prior to the USPTO, Mr. Holcombe served in executive-level positions at various firms. At the Harris Corporation, Mr. Holcombe served as the Vice-President and General Manager of Caprock Government Solutions (CGS), a communications provider to the U.S. Government. 

About the host 

As CEO of Ivanti, Jeff oversees all aspects of the company’s growth strategy and direction. Before becoming CEO of Ivanti in October 2021, Jeff was Ivanti’s President since January 2020. Jeff has over 25 years of experience working for enterprise software and services companies, including Accenture, Oracle and Infor. Jeff holds degrees from the University of Tennessee and Georgia State University. He sits on the National Alumni Board at the University of Tennessee and has previously held board positions with the Georgia Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the Posse Foundation. 

About Ivanti 

Ivanti elevates and secures Everywhere Work so that people and organizations can thrive. We make technology work for people, not the other way around. Today’s employees use a wide range of corporate and personal devices to access IT applications and data over multiple networks to stay productive wherever and however they work. Ivanti is one of the only technology companies that finds, manages and protects each IT asset and endpoint in an organization. Over 40,000 customers, including 88 of the Fortune 100, have chosen Ivanti to help them deliver an excellent digital employee experience and improve IT and security team productivity and efficiency. At Ivanti, we strive to create an environment where all perspectives are heard, respected and valued, and we are committed to a more sustainable future for our customers, partners, employees and the planet. For more information, visit ivanti.com and follow @GoIvanti. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:04 Pioneering AI at the USPTO
• 8:05 Augmentation, not replacement
• 9:58 Better EX translates to better CX
• 12:13 Proving the ROI of DEX
• 13:20 Creating a culture of digitally empowered employees

Transcript

[00:00] Introduction 

Jeff Abbott: There's been a ton of news on the rapid advancement of generative AI around the business world. And enthusiasm for its potential, I think it's fair to say, has reached a fever pitch. Would you believe that knowledge workers are six times more likely to say that the main beneficiaries of AI are employers rather than employees? 

Ivanti's recent research showed a high degree of skepticism about the individual benefits of AI, not only among workers as a whole, but interestingly, that the divide was even starker if you singled out the IT workers.  

They are eight times more likely to say that employers are the beneficiaries far more than employees. And yet, these are the very same workers who are tasked with implementing these tools throughout the enterprise. For leaders who are bullish about the opportunities that artificial intelligence can unlock, and I do count myself as one of them, this is a big hurdle to overcome. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today. 

I'm Jeff Abbott, and you're listening to Executive Summary, a podcast where we discuss the latest research in IT, security and the future of work, and what it all means to your business strategy. I'm really pleased to be joined today by Jamie Holcombe, the CIO of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Jamie is a 30-year veteran of IT leadership across both the public and private sector, spanning Fortune 500s and startups alike. Since taking on leadership of IT for the USPTO five years ago, Jamie has won major accolades for his work enabling the agency through AI, so he's the perfect guest for this topic. And Jamie, I'm just thrilled to have you here today. 

Jamie Holcombe: Well, I'm very thankful that you invited me because it's such a great topic to discuss, and there's so many subtleties and nuances, and yet the stark reality that it's going to propel us into the next generation of software is just so exciting! 

Jeff Abbott: It is. I couldn't agree more. Look, hey, before we launch into the discussion, I do want to give a brief overview of the research I've been citing today. The report is called “Getting Employees on Board for the AI Revolution,” and it's part of our Digital Employee Experience Research series. The responses come from two separate surveys Ivanti conducted in the first half of 2023, covering a total of 16,000 IT professionals, office workers and leaders.  

And what we see overwhelmingly as we look at the data from this work is that while there's tremendous opportunity for AI to improve the overall digital employee experience and alleviate the enormous workload on IT teams — there is angst. And there's still a lot of work for leaders to do to overcome their employees' concerns. 

[03:04] Pioneering AI at the USPTO 

Jamie, you came into this role five years ago with a change mandate to modernize a massive federal agency, no small feat. And part of why I'm excited to have you on to discuss this topic is that you've been part of that change mandate, and you were the pioneer of adopting AI within the patent office. 

Can you give our listeners some background on the sheer scale of that change, and where those innovative AI use cases, where they came from? 

Jamie Holcombe: Sure, it’d be my pleasure, because many people don't know that the Patent and Trademark Office has been open for over 200 years. Our mission is listed in the Constitution of the United States. And so, what we do is: we award patents, and we register trademarks. And when I came in, these people definitely understood what role they played, and they were so confident in what they do. However, the machines, the actual computers and the infrastructure on which they were doing it were 30 years old. 

So, in that vein, we went on a modernization and stabilization effort to the point now where five years later, we have a great stabilized base and infrastructure. But along the way, the biggest thing that changed was the artificial intelligence. 

And what I came up with were three distinct items, use cases. What they are is: classification, search and fraud. So, what we've done at the Patent and Trademark Office is classified patents based on the old way and the new way. And there's nothing that can replace people, but people's knowledge can be input into these algorithms to the point where the people become better because they're given the opportunity to really make those decisions about a learned algorithm, rather than the rote automation from before. 

In other words, if you're just doing something that you could do with a checklist and check off one through 10, and repeat doing that over and over again, that's just like any other automation. But, if you have something that you want the machine to learn on and then change its programming based on that learning, that becomes artificial intelligence. That's the difference. 

In a large respect, I want to get rid of that term "artificial intelligence" and call it "augmented intelligence" because that's the way it truly can be adopted. 

Now, an examiner — correction — a classifier, only has to come in and actually mitigate the exposure on really hard cases for classification. The regular ones, the rote ones, can just go through. So now we have more time to spend, and it becomes better quality. So that was the first use case. 

The second use case we did was search. And of course, what we tried to do was not replace the examiners but augment them. And so, in essence, we had an augmented bot for each examiner. Not the entire examiner core, but rather each examiner gets their own bot, and it learns from them on a user and personal basis. So, instead of replacement, you have augmentation. 

And finally, of course, we talk about fraud and the ability to recognize fraud by learning from fraudulent applications in the past. Now, that doesn't guarantee any future fraudulent applications, but at least you have a basis to learn from. So those are the three use cases. And we've been very successful in each area. 

Jeff Abbott: You know what's particularly fascinating and encouraging, Jamie, is, you know, your office and your team are really the cradle of innovation in this country, right? If you are from anywhere in the world, you know the United States is a place you can go and apply for a patent on something new and innovative.  

So ironically, here you are, not only changing the landscape of how the office is run, but the technology it uses and creating and fostering that, you know, spirit of innovation. And, you know, I just think that's fascinating for listeners to think about. Here you are, a 200-year-old agency that's completely reinvented itself with AI. Tremendous. 

Jamie Holcombe: Thank you very much, Jeff. In fact, that was one of my mantras that I got people to overcome their resistance to change by saying, "Hey, if we're America's innovation agency, we need to be innovative!" 

[08:05] Augmentation, not replacement

Jeff Abbott: For sure. Let's go back to the research for just a second. When we asked whether AI primarily benefits employers, employees or both, as I said in the introduction, Jamie, the results indicate that respondents overwhelmingly, they feel that employers reap the benefits.  

I was curious, in your position, have you felt that kind of skepticism across your team, and if so, how have you addressed it? 

Jamie Holcombe: Not necessarily in my team, but across the spectrum, I have definitely encountered that.  

Luckily, I started four years ago with this journey, and just recently it has caught a lot of attention because of generative AI and its applicability right away to almost any type of problem. 

So, you have to show results. What we've done at the USPTO is create an emerging technologies team, which takes in a lot of different business cases, and it proves the business case in the small. That's phase one. You need to get results in 90 days to prove that it works. In the next 90 days, then you have to show how it can scale because so what? It works in the small. It doesn't work in the big. Therefore, it could fail at that phase as well.  

And our final phase, the last 90 days, is an executive champion, somebody who's willing to pay for that to be put into production. Because if it's not put into production, what difference does it make? 

Jeff Abbott: Right. And I think what I can draw from your position is, hey, having been at it for four years and being a vocal and visible champion to the team for what the technology and AI can do for the team gives them a level of comfort, right? That this is about getting better as an organization, and it's really about the outcomes from the tools. And as you said, it's augmentation, not replacement. 

[09:58] Better EX translates to better CX 

So, I want to return to one of your points for a second, that AI is freeing up the workforce. We see across the research that the experience employees have with technology influences way more than their productivity and efficiency. 61% say that negative technology experience impacts their morale, and 17% say they they'd even consider leaving a job because of bad tech.  

And when you think about the digital employee experience in that context, you know, how good are the tools they use, and how efficient is the process that they operate under, it really reorients the role of IT. And I think that's evident in what you're talking about in terms of enabling the workforce. What's your reaction to that? 

Jamie Holcombe: Yes, everyone's talking about CX outside the applicants. Your customers from external. But we have a huge measure of EX: the employee experience. One of the things that we think is: examiners are the most important asset that we have, because that's our business!  

We award and reject, and examiners do that. The procurement staff doesn't do that. The HR staff doesn't do that. The examiners do that. So, if we have a great employee experience, we assume that we'll have a great customer experience. 

Now it doesn't always go one-for-one, but I always think that you should work on your employee experience first because it's definitely within your control. Then you work on your customer experience such that you know what the employees can and can't deliver. You understand the culture, and you know where they're coming from. And if you get the augmented intelligence to take care of their administrative and clerical deeds, right? You're able to create a better environment where they're working on quality issues and not paperwork. That's the best employee experience you can have. 

Jeff Abbott: Yeah, I agree. And look, I appreciate your point, especially about having a champion. And I think as we, you know, think about this technology evolution we're in, this is why more and more organizations, yourself included, Jamie, are measuring that digital experience or measuring what's working, what's not. 

[12:13] Proving the ROI of DEX 

An interesting point that came up in light of the research is that even though we're seeing a positive reaction to this concept of digital employee experience being something that IT owns, it's not really being operationalized. And about half of the IT respondents say it's not a high priority. 

What do you think is the stumbling block there for organizations in measuring digital experience? 

Jamie Holcombe: I think that so many executives have been burned by the promises of something that was never delivered. What we need to do in the boardroom is approve these emerging technology projects on a very limited basis, where it's "Show me the results, show me how it scales, and then get somebody to buy it." Make sure that you sell it to somebody, that it's going to be put in operation. Because if I ain't putting it in operation, I don't even want to talk about it. 

Jeff Abbott: I couldn't agree more. And to your point about "show me," measuring is proving, right? And looking every day through a DEX tool or otherwise is a great first step, no question. 

[13:20] Creating a culture of digitally empowered employees  

In light of everything we've talked about today, what's one thing you would tell our listeners to do differently when they approach either generative AI or digital experience, or the whole kind of technology landscape? 

Jamie Holcombe: I would say, take into consideration your culture. If you have an innovative culture, great! You can capitalize on that. But if you have that stodgy culture, recognize it. Don't spit into the wind. Try to get through to the folks on a business-case basis that this could really be good for them. Sell them on what's in it for them, not what's in it for you.  

Because if you don't get that executive champion, if you don't get that final phase three, it ain't gonna happen, and you're gonna fail miserably, and you're gonna fail big, which is the worst thing to do. 

Jeff Abbott: Excellent. Thanks, Jamie. 

Jamie Holcombe: Thank you, Jeff. 

Jeff Abbott: Well, look, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe and even better, share the podcast with a friend. You can see the research we discussed today at ivanti.com/research or just follow the links in the show notes. And you can find out more about Ivanti and our solutions at ivanti.com or follow us on social media @GoIvanti. I'm your host, Jeff Abbott, and I hope to see you next time on Executive Summary.