The MARQUES Famous and Well-Known Marks Team has published a report based on a survey of 42 MARQUES corporate members.

The confidential survey comprised 12 questions addressing how open compares are to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in-house and for which tasks it used or best suited.

You can read and download the report on the Team’s page here (MARQUES log-in required).

The survey suggests that, although many companies are talking about AI as a new reality and think of its potential wide use in the future, the majority of in-house counsel are concerned about privacy/confidentiality matters and consider it important to keep human input/control/monitoring over AI-generated work.

Less than half of companies that participated in the survey have started using AI for simplifying IP/legal work in-house. Moreover, most of the tools used are related to the repetitive preliminary work, with the expectation of further checks by humans.

The questions in the survey were:

1. Is there an internal IP-specific policy regarding AI already implemented in your company?
2. Has your company started using AI for marketing activities?
3. If yes, did you already try to protect any IP rights around the result of that work?
4. If so, what type of IP?
5. Do you allow creative agencies to use AI in their work process?
6. If yes, how do you allow AI use?
7. If you allowed creative agencies to use AI, do you have special clauses in contracts with them?
8. Do you update existing contracts or apply only to new ones?
9. What does the clause see to?
10. Have you started using any AI platform/system to simplify the in-house legal department work?

In addition, respondents were asked to mention countries and industries in which their companies operate.

The survey makes it clear that the situation with the AI is progressing daily. The answers by some companies and final conclusions of this report are expected to change in the course of the next years, if not months.

The report was compiled and edited by Nigar Kirimova of Essity, Marlou van de Braak of Heineken and Giordano Cardini of Ferrero who are members of the AI Sub-Team of the MARQUES Famous and Well-Known Marks Team.