Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast to help your company use AI and IP law to gain a competitive edge
If you're a business leader or general counsel, you already know AI isn't just another tech trend. It's the next frontier reimagining and reshaping how companies operate and compete. With that transformation comes complexity around intellectual property, data rights, regulatory oversight, litigation exposure, and brand integrity. This podcast is designed to give you clarity. I'm Justin Pierce, cochair of Venable's intellectual property division.
Justin Pierce:In this season, I'll talk with colleagues and industry leaders about how AI is reshaping business, ecommerce platforms, toy companies, industrial automation, luxury brands, beyond, and the legal strategies companies need to protect innovation while moving fast. Our goal is simple, to help you turn our legal insight into your competitive advantage. Welcome to season two of AI and IP: The Legal Frontier. This week, we're talking about AI and industrial automation.
Justin Pierce:Hi. I'm Justin Pierce, a partner at Venable and co chair of the firm's intellectual property division. As artificial intelligence continues to transform industries built on data and automation, companies are rethinking how to integrate these tools into both their products and their internal operations. In sectors like industrial automation, where reliability, safety and precision are paramount, AI presents both powerful opportunities and complex challenges. From predictive maintenance and reinforcement learning systems to emerging AI agents, businesses are exploring how to leverage AI without disrupting established workflows or compromising trust. In this episode, we examine how in house counsel are navigating AI adoption, aligning tools with business realities, and balancing efficiency gains with the need for human judgment and control.
Justin Pierce:I'm talking today to Mike Turner, Director of IP Strategy for Yokogawa, a leading global provider of industrial automation, test and measurement solutions. Hello, Mike. Thanks for joining us. Glad you're here and looking forward to a great episode with you. Mike, I know you're a senior IP director at Yokogawa, but I'd love to hear more about your current position and role, and how you got to where you are today.
Mike Turner:Sure. And Justin, thanks for having me. Happy to happy to be here. I cover all IP issues for the Americas, Yokogawa, primarily US. So, a lot of that's going to be prosecution work, figuring out what the most useful patent portfolio might look like, and figuring out how we can build that.
Mike Turner:And so a lot of that is going to be trying to understand IP landscapes and understanding Yokogawa's various businesses, and putting together an IP strategy that works with that business. And executing and iterating and executing and iterating. But then there's everything else, the stuff that's more irregular, the stuff that just kinda pops up, the third party issues, contract issues, M&A , internal IP education, so, you know, everything IP for them.
Justin Pierce:Got it. That's kind of an array of things. What'd you do prior to your in house time at Yokogawa?
Mike Turner:I came up through an IP firm Kenyon & Kenyon. I was there for a long time. It merged into a couple of other firms. So right before this, I was a partner at Hunton Andrews Kurth
Justin Pierce:Okay.
Mike Turner:Which was where a lot of the the Kenyan folks had had ended up.
Justin Pierce:So now in your current role, you mentioned kind of a wide variety of things ranging from IP strategy to what I like to say is putting out fires, which comes up, third party claims, and probably an array of different things. What I've seen a lot in the IP counsel world is you've got to focus on many of the things that you talked about, which is sort of law, law for your main client, which is a company, but then the business of just running your in house department. And in those two roles today, with the introduction of AI and AI tools, I wonder how that's impacting both aspects of your in house life.
Mike Turner:Sure. Well, there's certainly the way that the company uses AI in the stuff it makes and sells, and how the IP department supports the company in that space. And then, of course, there's the way that the IP department is is using AI for its internal operations. So Yokogawa is a 100 year old Japanese industrial automation and control company.
Mike Turner:So there are interesting dynamics around AI in that business that, our core business has always been about using data to to automate industrial processes, and so that's gathering data from sensors, processing it, making control decisions, executing on those control decisions. And so using AI to automate a lot of that is kind of a natural next step and something we've been doing for a good while now. But many of our customers are in industries that are very risk averse, so they're not always necessarily looking for the newest thing. They're they're really looking for reliability more than anything else.
Justin Pierce:Right.
Mike Turner:You know, a lot of them have facilities that will run smoothly for decades without real small upgrades, but without real meaningful changes. And a lot of them have facilities that are very expensive. They cost a lot of money when they don't run. Not to mention that for a lot of them, they're in industries, chemical, energy, where it can be very dangerous when things go wrong. Our customers make a lot of things that explode.
Mike Turner:So we wanna make sure that that the things we're offering are reliable. That's really the number one thing. Certainly. And the next thing is they they always want to be able to - it's very popular in our business to do a root cause analysis for anything that's gone wrong. So there's a lot of reliability and keeping track of things.
Justin Pierce:When you're looking at the industry as a whole, and I want to talk a little bit more about AI, in particular because I think Yokogawa is unique in terms of the fact that you have been in automation and in factories for years. You've been using all types of technology whether it's automation, whether it's measurement, optimization. What's interesting today is all the focus around generative AI, and AI is sort of a mass market tool. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about some of the types of AI that Yokogawa has been using. I suspect it's probably in the machine learning area.
Mike Turner:One place where it makes a lot of sense is in predictive maintenance. You're trying to figure out when that big expensive piece of equipment is going to break down, when you should do maintenance on it, when you might think about replacing it. And traditionally, you'd be checking the outputs, or you'd have someone inspect it, and then we also have some sensor systems that look out for whether it's vibrating oddly or the temperature is off or something like that. But now we're putting a lot of AI into, let's say, the data loggers or the the data analysis systems that are behind those sensors to look for patterns that are indicating issues that maybe aren't as obvious to somebody walking around a facility.
Mike Turner:So I would say predictive maintenance is one. Another big one for us is something called the FKDPP, which stands for factorial kernel dynamic policy programming, and I had to write that down to make sure that I remembered what it was. Basically, it's a reinforcement learning AI.
Mike Turner:We developed it with the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. It's really just better at at independently optimizing control decisions. And so we've put that FKDPP into several places. We we did it at a Japanese chemical plant that was able to control distillation operations at that plant without human intervention for over a year. I think traditionally, you'd have a a combination of control processes and experienced people manually turning valves here and there.
Mike Turner:But the AI can do a lot of that on its own. It can it can keep appropriate liquid levels. It can redistribute waste heat and steam, giving you efficiency, stability, safety compared to some traditional systems.
Justin Pierce:That's amazing. For a year.
Mike Turner:And we've put it in a couple of places. We had it in a a gas plant that was controlling acid gas removal. Which, same idea, better use of resources, more stability. We also had it in a brewery in Japan, and using this process, we were able to to bring the fermentation process down from fourteen days to ten days. So it's that kind of a thing. It it obviously has broad applicability. But you can see a lot of the efficiencies there.
Justin Pierce:Yeah. It's just kind of amazing thinking through some of those use cases and cases that you've already had some pretty advanced use in optimization, productivity, efficiency across different industries, and obviously lots of data and evidence to show for it. Are you aware of any other types of activities like that in a broader sense across the industry that you're in?
Mike Turner:There's a lot of similar approaches across the industry. So I wouldn't say that Yokogawa is the only one. This entire industry is about bringing in that data through whatever it is, field instruments, sensor systems, whatever, and then figuring out what to do next.
Mike Turner:And so that part of figuring out what to do next, highlighting patterns that we might not have noticed before, I think everybody's chasing similar things there. But the real competitive edge tends to come in how reliable can you make those things. Not necessarily certainly, everybody's looking for efficiency, but reliability is as important, if not more important.
Justin Pierce:Reliability is really the distinctive factor from an IP sense as well, it sounds like.
Mike Turner:The IP department's function is to support the businesses and protect and promote the areas where we're really solving customer problems. And so when you think about customer problems, the reliability issue is, I would say, pretty paramount. Not exclusive, of course, but
Justin Pierce:Certainly. It's gotta be high on the list.
Narrator:Building a beauty or wellness brand takes more than great products and marketing. On Venable's Beauty Law Glow-Up podcast, partners Claudia Lewis and Kristen Ruisi explore the trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the industry today. From influencer marketing and product safety to privacy, trademarks, and brand growth. Each episode delivers practical insights to help companies build, protect, and grow their brand with confidence. Search for The Beauty Law Glow-Up wherever you listen.
Justin Pierce:Another topic for you, and this is hot recently, and I think one that's going to continue to be important as we move forward with AI technology. But given your focus on optimization, measurement, automated sensors, and management of systems in industrial scenarios, what do you think about what's happening now with respect to AI agents and the technology around AI agents?
Mike Turner:There's a lot of opportunity. And if we're talking about in the context of Yokogawa's business, if you think about the way a lot of these facilities are run, it tends to be a team of people sitting in a control room trying to work through information that's popping up on their screens. Of course, a lot of that relies on experience of the people in that room. And so where there are opportunities for investigation are going to be places where maybe we can pull that experience and reuse it in an agent elsewhere to support a team that may or may not have that experience.
Mike Turner:So I think you're going to be seeing places where the person who's looking at the screen might not necessarily recognize the particular alarm condition or whatever it is that they're looking at, and to know what is the next action from here. And there might be a lot of information that's coming in in different ways, or a lot of information that may or may not be known to that team at the time. And so all of this is sort of surfacing that information and helping get to what is the next step here. How can I resolve this problem quickly and efficiently?
Justin Pierce:It's a great example, and application. I think they're really, perhaps if I say it another way, sounds like you're saying agents could be a great coworker or an assistant
Mike Turner:Yeah.
Justin Pierce:To one of these teams that's working in the control room.
Mike Turner:To a certain extent, that's true. I mean, one of the things I think that everybody has to worry about is that the teams are built to operate a certain way. It is often true that there are opportunities for agents to come in and assist in certain places. But if they're misaligned with the way the team is structured, then the team can't effectively adopt that particular agent's use case.
Mike Turner:So, I wouldn't say it's as easy as, throw an agent at it, and suddenly we can solve the problem. But I do think there are slow opportunities to develop in our business as this technology moves forward
Justin Pierce:Certainly.
Mike Turner:To try to restructure the way we handle some of these situations.
Justin Pierce:Certainly. And hearing that, I think that's a great segue to AI governance and alignment. You talked about AI agents would be probably harmful or at least not useful at all if it's not going to flow with the way that team works or at least not augment the way they work. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts just about AI governance, still an early area that's being developed. And what I mean by that in this particular case and what you do are just establishing some of the rules of the road, the guardrails around how AI or AI tool or agent might be used in your industry or in a company.
Mike Turner:You want to be careful, I think, balancing the opportunity with the sort of reality. I think this comes up a lot when we talk about let's say in our IP department, the types of tools that we use. Sort of the other category of IP work. I think oftentimes, there can be a little bit of a gap between the miracle of the tool that is being sold to you, and then the actual experience with it.
Mike Turner:And I think it often comes from sometimes that misalignment.
Justin Pierce:Right.
Mike Turner:Where it's being sold as a a tool that can magically do all your work for you, but then that's not exactly what happens. Or like I said, the output or the function of it doesn't really sit with your team the way your team is used to sitting with that type of output.
Justin Pierce:Good point.
Mike Turner:And if it mismatches, then it's really hard, I think, for a team to adjust its working behavior or capability to really integrate that information and make it useful. And I actually think there are a lot of people out there who feel pretty torn about this. They're being told that AI is changing the world, and it's this incredible tool that's, going to make everything you do totally different. But then they haven't actually been able to see it. They haven't actually found the right application yet. There are many in house IP functions where it's just not necessarily going to be more efficient than somebody who already knows what they're doing, at least not right now Without substantial changes to the way your team operates.
Justin Pierce:Right.
Mike Turner:Like any other software onboarding, you need use cases and dedicated time for it and mistakes and iteration and and all of that.
Justin Pierce:So AI governance workflows. I would even say perhaps company culture and how people work with software tools or any of the tools we're given are big factors on whether AI is gonna actually be effective for that team or not.
Mike Turner:Yeah. It's probably a matter of sort of how soon. Because it does feel like a lot of these things are eventually getting integrated.
Justin Pierce:Right.
Mike Turner:But there's a lot of pressure to make it happen now, or at least I would say it's sort of in the ether where it feels like people feel pressured to integrate this stuff right now. Maybe it's useful, maybe it's not, and I think you have to figure it out a little bit, whether it is aligned with with you or not. Just as an example, I think a lot of the AI tools or the vendors that sell to me, often fail to consider that some IP departments are mostly outsourcing the work that the vendor wants me to use an AI tool to accomplish.
Justin Pierce:So Interesting.
Mike Turner:What you're doing is you're basically now asking me to bring this function in house with something that used to be outsourced. You want me to bring it in house because this agent or tool can do it more cheaply.
Justin Pierce:Right.
Mike Turner:And may maybe it is cheaper. But it also might end up being a lot more work for the in house team to spin that out into something that's that's useful. And I've heard pitches for several tools where I've thought this would make a ton of sense for the vendor or the consultant or the law firm that I'm working with.
Justin Pierce:Right.
Mike Turner:But I'm a little hesitant to bring it in house at the moment.
Justin Pierce:It's a great point, and it's a great distinction. I think that's also a great way of looking at misalignment and gap between the expectations and what a tool can do. I love the nuance there. The tool may be powerful and may give you some sort of productivity or efficiency, but if it's not in the right hands or where the actual work's supposed to be done as opposed to, in your case, the strategy or leadership that's supposed to be around it, then there is a misalignment in terms of where the product's gonna have its best use. Yeah. Very good point.
Mike Turner:And I think a lot of people know where these tools are great. It's great for IP tasks that would otherwise be a ton of work, but don't necessarily require high precision.
Justin Pierce:Right.
Mike Turner:Like, there are there are many projects that just kind of need to be directionally correct, that just need to be done quickly. And so I don't know whether it's landscaping or trend analysis, something where you have high volumes of patents that need to be viewed from 30,000 feet, or each patent might not require deep scrutiny.
Justin Pierce:Right.
Mike Turner:Or you're searching for something in a pile of documents that you know is there, but you just can't find it, or other applications like that. There are definitely ways to make it useful.
Justin Pierce:In fact, that list you just gave in those examples, I look at those as sort of AI related opportunities that you'd probably see in your role or perhaps even more generally in the industry. And I think that's the kind of promise of AI that is making it so popular and putting the pressure for sales and the pressure for a lot of organizations to try to adopt it as fast as possible. Moving from that opportunity perspective, though, I wonder if you see any AI risks with what's going on as well. Are there any risks in particular that you see in the industry or or that you've seen even at your company that, you know, as an in house counsel, give you some pause or give you some concern? Yeah. And let me caveat by just saying, I assume that my experience is going to be different from, let's say, the IP department at a tech company that's having serious frontier AI work done in their company. We're not building our own tools. We're just using off the shelf stuff, and some of those will have limitations that are getting more and more useful all the time. I'm just saying that I think the experience might be different if you work at a different kind of company.
Justin Pierce:Makes sense.
Mike Turner:I do think that the fears about outsourcing thinking, for example, are are well founded. You know, I think we should all be making sure we're using it to inform thinking and not replace thinking. I think we can lose the thread here pretty quickly if we're not careful. Emails, I think, are a great example. There's a whole culture out there about how people in office jobs, everybody hates emails. Everybody talks about how we hate our email inboxes. But I think emails are pretty effective when they're done properly. And from my experience, I think a lot of the generative AI stuff struggles to be direct and and concise.
Mike Turner:And not to make too big of a point about it, but I think there is immense value in actually taking time thinking about what you want to say. You know, communication is kind of fundamental to who we are as people, and if you're letting it replace your communication, you might want to rethink what you're trying to do in your communicating.
Justin Pierce:Absolutely. I'd say probably communications is key to your function as a lawyer and as a, risk reduction professional for your company as well. So very good points. In terms of your thoughts on in house legal teams versus outside counsel, we talked a little bit about that before where there are certain tools where you think they might be better in the hands of outside legal counsel. What are some examples that you've seen on the in house side of either good use of AI or areas where you'd like to see AI integrated in a way that's helpful to in house counsel?
Mike Turner:Well, I do think there is opportunity. Let's just say preparing patent applications. I think in many ways, are kind of perfect for AI because there's a lot of repetition and rule following, but you just gotta be careful not to let it get you away from the reasons you wanted to file in the first place.
Justin Pierce:True.
Mike Turner:I think it's great for learning about technology. I think it's great to argue with it if you want to try to figure out flaws in whatever it is you're trying to say. If you can't figure out exactly how to use it, you can kind of just ask it, which I think is a nice function.
Justin Pierce:That is a great feature.
Mike Turner:I mean, the flexibility of it is useful. And so we're always trying to communicate ideas, especially in law firms which are representing a wide variety of clients on different topics. I think using it to make yourself more intelligent on a particular issue is better than sort of having it let's say, replace your function.
Justin Pierce:Certainly.
Mike Turner:And, you know, let let me add something if it's okay.
Justin Pierce:Sure.
Mike Turner:I'm just not an early adopter by nature. I tend to be somewhat skeptical of new technologies that are geared to add more intermediated layers between humans in the world, and I kind of think that's exactly what this AI is doing. So when I use the Gen AI tools, I always have this feeling that it's mocking me a little bit. It's saying, here, this is what you sound like when you try to do this this type of work. And I think the next step from that is to reflect on a lot of the work that we're doing, and to realize that a lot of it maybe wasn't that efficient.
Mike Turner:But I also would caution against putting an unending emphasis on a robotic efficiency over something more like thoughtfulness, and judgment, and humanity, and our work. The stuff that we do, you don't want to pull it so far out that it removes from the people you're doing it with or the people you're doing it for. All of our stakeholders, customers, clients, whatever it is, they're all people who are trying to get something done, and the work you do for them is inherently human, and so let's not let it go too far.
Justin Pierce:That's well said, and it's a great point. That brings us to the closing part here. We always like to have a couple of takeaways in our discussion. One thing I see from our wide ranging talk today already is the fact that AI is certainly helpful. We're still early in its development and its application, particularly on the generative side for the practice of law.
Justin Pierce:I think Yokogawa is a great example of a company that's been using AI in the machine learning, predictive analytics field for years now. But with respect to what we do as counsel and as advisers, one takeaway for me is AI is a tool, but it shouldn't replace the thinking. It can be a thinking partner, but don't use it to substitute your judgment and your values. Any takeaways you want to leave us with?
Mike Turner:I really think that there are people out there at this moment where the AI tools tend to be a solution in search of a problem. Everybody thought they were doing fine, and now they're supposed to do everything differently. And I think people get frustrated by that, and they they can't necessarily see the value while the whole world is going nuts for AI. I would just say, if you can't find a use case yet, you're not alone. Don't feel bad about it, and think about maybe trying some different approaches and see what you can find.
Justin Pierce:That's great. Excellent takeaway. Thank you, Mike.
Mike Turner:Thanks for having me, Justin.
Justin Pierce:That's about all we have time for today. I want to thank Mike Turner for helping us better understand how AI is being applied in industrial automation, how in house teams are evaluating its real world value, and why maintaining human judgment remains critical as these tools continue to evolve. You can read more about how Venable is helping businesses navigate the AI frontier by visiting venable.com/ai. Please join us next week when I talk to Marvell Semiconductor's Kelvin Vivian about how in house legal teams are adapting their IP strategies and what it takes to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
Justin Pierce:I'm Justin Pierce. Thanks for listening to AI and IP: The Legal Frontier.