Adding AI to a product is not a strategy. Moving to where the value is going is. And every real move changes what your company controls, which makes it an IP strategy decision before it is a technology one.

An article in I by IMD puts this well. It maps AI strategy on two axes: how much of the customer relationship you control, and how many technologies and partners you have to orchestrate. Four positions follow – focused differentiation, vertical integration, collaborative ecosystem and platform leadership. The authors’ line is that “only genuine transitions – changing what a company integrates or what it controls – reposition it where value is heading.” An AI-enabled kettle is a feature. A hearing aid that becomes a health-monitoring platform is a move.

Their examples show where the IP sits. Logitech is partnering with the major AI platforms rather than building its own stack, and positioning itself as the interface between people and AI. Signify moved from selling bulbs to selling software and data relationships with enterprise customers. TomTom is the cautionary case: navigation moved into phones and cars, and the position went with it.

What the partnership licence decides

Each of those moves turns on rights that are usually settled in a partnership agreement nobody outside legal reads closely. Three questions decide whether a company controls its new position or merely supplies it:

– Who owns the interface layer? If your product is the way customers reach a platform, the protectable value is in that interaction – the design, the software, the patents on how it works – not in the commodity hardware behind it.
– Who owns the data and the customer relationship? Signify’s shift only pays if the data terms and the enterprise contracts sit with Signify, not with a platform partner.
– What happens when the platform partner enters your market? The article notes that platform owners can move into hardware directly. Your partnership terms, and the patents and trade secrets you have kept out of the joint work, are what you have left on that day.

Standards are the sharpest version of this. The article compares platform leadership to USB becoming the standard for connecting devices. Helping to set a standard is valuable only if you hold rights in it, or at least secure licences on terms that survive the standard’s success. Otherwise you have built a road for everyone else to drive on.

The same logic runs through Own the Platform, or Pay to Use It and Who Gets Paid for the Platform? Lessons From a Big Week in AI and Intellectual Property: the layer underneath the product is where the returns accrue. And the integrate-or-partner choice itself is a licensing decision, as Build, Buy or Licence? What Bayer’s Hybrid Wheat Deal Teaches About IP Licensing Strategy shows.

For a board, the useful question is not “what is our AI strategy”. It is “after this move, what will we control that we did not control before, and what do the contracts say about keeping it”.

Read the article: AI strategy is a journey – these are the levers that matter, Cyril Bouquet, Nicolas Chauvin and Julian Nolan, I by IMD.