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Interview
Patent Portfolio Strategy for Staying Ahead in the Rapidly Evolving AI Field
December 16, 2025
With new topics such as large language models (LLMs) and Agentic AI emerging one after another, the field of AI continues to expand with new possibilities. Globally, numerous companies are engaged in technological development, and the frontlines are constantly shifting at a rapid pace. In this highly competitive arena, how is NEC utilizing intellectual property, advancing its business, and delivering value to society? We spoke with the leader responsible for building NEC’s patent portfolio in the AI domain.
Profile
Mika Saito
Patent Portfolio Manager
Intellectual Property Portfolio Creation Department
Mika Saito began her career as a researcher in software engineering at another company, where her involvement with patent applications sparked a keen interest in intellectual property. She later transitioned to a patent law firm, where she became qualified as a patent attorney. In July 2015, she joined NEC, where she took on responsibilities for securing and managing intellectual property rights in areas such as video surveillance and artificial intelligence. Since April 2021, Ms. Saito has served as Patent Portfolio Manager, overseeing the management of NEC’s patent portfolios in the AI and healthcare domains.
Her responsibilities include formulating intellectual property strategies, developing and managing patent portfolios and budgets, setting various key performance indicators (KPIs) to build a robust patent portfolio aligned with the intellectual property strategy, leading initiatives to achieve these KPIs, and managing her team members.
Pursuing both business defense and active monetization
What does patent portfolio management involve?
At NEC, our approach to patent portfolio management is centered on maximizing value by closely aligning our portfolio with corporate and business strategies. This involves not only securing rights for individual inventions, but also strategically optimizing the portfolio as a whole: selecting key technology domains for focused intellectual property investment and making informed decisions as to which rights to maintain or divest. Since the acquisition and maintenance of intellectual property require substantial investment, it is not feasible to retain patents for every technology across all business areas. Strategic prioritization is essential—we direct our resources toward those areas that most effectively accelerate our business objectives, building a portfolio that generates the greatest possible value within the scope of our budget.
Moreover, our patent portfolio serves broader purposes beyond business defense. In recent years, we have been enhancing our portfolio strategically to actively showcase NEC’s technological and business strengths and to contribute to business monetization. Demonstrating our capabilities in technology and business directly supports our sales efforts; our patents also provide objective evidence of NEC’s technical excellence and commercial potential. Accordingly, we place high importance on acquiring and utilizing patents that enhance corporate value and open up new business opportunities.
When it comes to monetization, while licensing remains a directly effective approach, our perspective is much broader. With AI now established as a cross-industry, foundational technology, we are seeing its applications rapidly proliferate across sectors including manufacturing, healthcare, finance, the public sector, and distribution. Anticipating ongoing growth in AI adoption, we regard our intellectual property as a starting point from which to anticipate global market trends and technological developments. We continually consider questions such as, “Can this patent be deployed horizontally in other industries?” and “How might this technology enable new business opportunities?” By staying ahead of these trends from an intellectual property standpoint, we proactively make proposals to our business units and new business development teams that contribute to future revenue creation.
The accelerating pace of innovation defies conventional patent portfolio strategies
Are there any unique challenges in building a patent portfolio in the AI domain?
Above all, the rapid pace of technological advancement presents a formidable challenge. Even focusing only on large language models (LLMs), the evolution over the past two years has far outstripped what could have been anticipated. Since patent applications are not published until 18 months after filing, such rapid developments within a year or two significantly impact the development of a robust patent portfolio. For instance, when monitoring intellectual property trends at the leading edge of agentic AI, most relevant patents remain unpublished, making it difficult to access crucial information. Traditionally, we have employed patent benchmarking—a method that allows us to objectively analyze competitors’ filing activities and assess our own strategic positioning. However, in rapidly evolving sectors like advanced AI, conventional tools such as this are reaching their limit.
To address these challenges, we have adopted an agile, hypothesis-driven approach. By closely tracking trends in widely adopted LLM products and related services, we actively formulate and validate multiple hypotheses, such as: “If competitors move into the agentic AI space, what type of patent portfolio might they pursue?” “If a particular technology becomes mainstream, which rights will be critical to secure?” “Are companies releasing these tools leveraging LLMs to build AI agents?” Through repeated, agile testing and refinement of these hypotheses, we continuously evolve our strategy in real time.
Another unique aspect of AI as a domain is its core reliance on algorithms. Patents limited to internal computational logic alone may not always suffice for business protection, as much of AI's internal workings are concealed, making infringement analysis extremely challenging. Therefore, when seeking patent protection, we take a multi-layered approach, ensuring coverage across related domains and multiple perspectives. Instead of relying on one main patent, we employ a strategic portfolio approach, combining complementary patents to build a robust defense. Achieving this requires specialized insight and practical knowledge of each business sector; our IP teams collaborate closely with researchers and engineers who possess deep understanding of real-world operating environments, ensuring that our decisions are well-informed.
Furthermore, the AI sector includes some exceptionally large competitors, and given their resources, competing on sheer patent quantity alone is not a viable strategy. For NEC, it is critical to focus our intellectual property resources on domains where we have unique strengths. Our technological foundation in world-leading biometrics and image recognition, combined with our expertise in deploying reliable, interpretable AI—capable of producing accountable outputs at the point of social implementation—sets us apart. By leveraging these technological assets, we strategically concentrate our IP investments in areas where we can succeed. We constantly assess which “mountain” (technology domain) to climb and which “route” (IP strategy) to chart.
IP professionals as inventors—Broad-ranging experiences unique to NEC
What are some of the unique characteristics of working in intellectual property at NEC?
There are three distinctive features, in my view.
First, at NEC, you have the opportunity to engage not only with the latest AI inventions, but also with innovations that integrate AI across a diverse array of technology domains—including communications, security, and cloud platforms. Contributing to these cross-disciplinary, comprehensive inventions is an experience that is rare in other companies. NEC provides a unique environment where you can collaborate directly with leading researchers from a variety of specialties, as well as engineers working in fields that range from the ocean floor to outer space. The ability to seek guidance from, or co-create with, such a wide spectrum of experts is one of NEC’s unique strengths.
Second, NEC has a longstanding tradition of delivering mission-critical solutions that form the backbone of society—including in government, finance, and manufacturing. Working on intellectual property for projects where AI technology is embedded at the infrastructure level of society carries with it a deep sense of responsibility and professional satisfaction.
Third, under NEC’s unique Client Zero philosophy—where we consider ourselves as our own initial customer—we foster an environment where IP professionals themselves can be inventors. For example, we are actively advancing “IP DX”（See Advancing NEC’s Unique Approach to IP DX with Generative AI）by leveraging AI to transform our own IP operations, and the expertise and innovations gained through these initiatives are frequently filed as new inventions. In fact, within my own team, younger members are progressively taking the lead in patenting their ideas, resulting in more inventors emerging directly from the IP division. This hands-on experience also becomes an important source of value for our customers.
Maximizing value through the integration of patents, designs, and know-how
What are your future goals?
In the short term, our goal is to reinforce and protect our AI-related business, while actively promoting monetization strategies such as licensing. By doing so, we aim to further increase our direct contribution to the business through intellectual property. To achieve this, our immediate focus will be on strengthening the core patent portfolio that underpins our operations.
Looking further ahead, our medium- to long-term goal is to drive even greater value creation. Specifically, we intend to further evolve our “IP-MIX” approach in the AI domain. IP-MIX refers to our strategy of integrating patents, designs, and know-how to maximize the value of our technological assets. In AI, value is determined not only by the underlying technology (patents) but also by how it is presented (designs) and how it is utilized and refined (know-how). For example, the UI/UX—the “face” of an AI solution—can be strategically protected with design rights, securing unique value that goes beyond technology alone and supporting business differentiation. Similarly, aspects that represent our “secret sauce” may be intentionally kept as proprietary know-how rather than disclosed through patents, as the publication required by patents could risk revealing the core of our technology to competitors.
Rather than limiting our perspective to patent portfolio development, we are committed to anticipating how our solutions and services will be realized in the market. Our approach extends to proposing exit strategies and business models that leverage the optimal combination of patents, designs, and know-how to create winning business pathways. By engaging in value creation from the earliest stages of business development, we seek to make a direct contribution to revenue. Moving forward, we will strengthen collaboration with our internal design teams and other relevant departments as we pursue these initiatives.
NEC’s Purpose is to promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. We are committed to supporting the delivery of powerful technologies like AI to society—not only with advanced functionality, but also with trust—by leveraging intellectual property.
- *Company names and job titles are as of the date of the interview
