Accenture's Federal Arm to Help USPTO Innovate Under $50M BPA; Ira Entis Quoted

The federal arm of Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has landed a spot on a potential five-year, $50 million blanket purchase agreement to support the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in technology pilot, test and implementation projects.

Accenture Federal Services will aim to help USPTO transform the agency’s business and mission delivery processes through the multi-award Intelligent Automation and Innovation Support Services BPA, the company said Thursday.

“Our studio teams use advanced software prototyping, applied data intelligence, and the service design expertise of Fjord — Accenture Interactive’s design and innovation consultancy — to help clients across all sectors of the federal government create citizen-and people-centric tools,” said Ira Entis, growth and strategy lead at AFS.

The BPA encompasses technology areas such as intelligent automation, artificial intelligence, microservices, machine learning, natural language processing, robotic process automation and blockchain.

AFS teamed up with Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOGL) cloud business to help the agency’s patent examiners perform more thorough searches by augmenting their on-premise search tools with AI.

The companies’ joint platform integrates Google’s machine learning models with AFS’ design, prototyping and data science tools to extend examiners’ expertise during the patent search process.

“We are excited to apply our scalable, secure infrastructure and latest AI solutions toward helping USPTO improve how it performs patent searches. Our hope is that these tools will deliver everyone —from startups to large businesses—higher quality patent search results, which means more reliable patents overall,” said Mike Daniels, vice president of Google’s global public sector business.

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