Sharaz Gill has been appointed to ensure that the company's patent holdings are fully aligned with business objectives and to help identify further acquisition opportunities. AI will be crucial to this mission

Sisvel may not currently own a huge number of patent families, but those it does possess play a vital role in adding value to current pools, as well as ones that may be developed in the future. Sharaz Gill was recently appointed as Head of Portfolio Management to ensure that the firm’s portfolio is fully aligned with business strategy and to identify opportunities to enhance it.

Gill has held just about every position in the patent field including engineer, inventor, examiner, litigator, licensor, implementer, pool manager and, most recently, analytics entrepreneur. His experience spans the European Patent Office and companies such as Qualcomm, HTC, Via LA and, most recently IP Mind – the AI-driven analytics firm that he co-founded in 2023.

In an interview with Sisvel Insights, Gill explains his new role, how his previous posts have shaped his views of the patent market and why AI is set to be such a gamechanger – but only for those who know how to deploy it correctly.

Sharaz Gill speaks at a WIPO conference in 2025

You’ve been named Head of Portfolio Management for Sisvel. It’s a role created just for you – what are your plans?

Across my career, I have worked at every stage of the patent lifecycle: invention, prosecution, licensing and litigation. One of the consistent challenges that I have seen is that these functions are often insufficiently aligned.

Sisvel is addressing this directly by building a portfolio in a more structured and strategic way, which underpins the long-term growth of its pools and programmes.

My role is to assess the current portfolio in detail, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and define a clear development strategy. That includes both organic development and targeted acquisitions that will reinforce Sisvel’s position as an aggregator.

A key part of this is determining where AI can genuinely add value, and how best to deploy it, whether through internal development or external tools.

What attracted me to Sisvel is that there is a clear vision at management level and strong agreement across the organisation as to how to execute it.

Your career spans prosecution, litigation and licensing at a very high level. How does that breadth of experience shape your approach to this new role?

It is central to how I approach portfolio management. Most organisations still operate in functional silos, but the reality is that any portfolio is ultimately tested across all three disciplines.

I have operated at a senior level in each of them: I have prosecuted patents, led licensing programmes, and been directly involved in major litigation. During my time at HTC, I was in the middle of the smartphone wars, where we constantly had to punch above our weight through careful strategy and execution. That gave me a very direct understanding of how portfolios perform under real pressure.

It also means that I have seen more SEP litigation first-hand than most in-house practitioners, which has provided me with a clear perspective on what ultimately matters when patents are tested in court.

Each discipline places different demands on a portfolio. Litigation requires robustness at the claim level; licensing depends on clear relevance to standards and products; and prosecution must anticipate how technologies and markets will evolve.

What I bring to this role is the ability to integrate those perspectives. The aim is to ensure that the portfolio not only is technically strong, but also performs effectively in licensing, withstands litigation scrutiny and delivers sustained commercial value.

Which parts of the business will you be working with to bring all this about?

I’m working very closely with Sisvel Tech, which was responsible for managing the assets before the creation of a portfolio management function. Sisvel is very lucky to have great engineers in-house, and no AI tool can replace that. Part of my job in managing the portfolio is taking enormous volumes of data and removing as much noise as possible so that the Sisvel Tech team can focus its resources where they will have greatest impact.

I sit within the legal department under Sisvel Chief Legal Officer Steve Jedlinski, whose team is very much connected with the commercial goals set out by management. And of course, I have been working closely with the new business team, which is responsible for strategic acquisitions.

As someone who has worked for both major SEP owners and implementers, what made you want to take a role with a patent pool administrator?

I think it’s a real shame that people don’t jump from one side of the industry to the other more often. The debate has become ideological – almost tribal, one might say. You go to the same conferences, and the two sides are talking past one another. Given my experiences with Qualcomm and then with HTC, I’m sympathetic to some of the arguments on both sides. I have no time for companies engaging in hold-out: but when I was at HTC, we really were trying to pay the right people; we just didn’t know who owned the patents.

This question of transparency has been an overarching concern of mine for a very long time and has shaped much of my subsequent career. With IP Mind, the AI-driven essentiality checking business that I co-founded, I saw a way of finally solving the transparency problem. But it also became clear to me that technology alone couldn’t bridge the gap. That’s where I think there’s a strong potential role for patent pools.

Why did you decide to move on from IP Mind?

I had been looking at AI since the 1980s when I was an engineering student; and for a long time, it promised great things and delivered very little. But when large language models exploded onto the scene in November 2022, I quickly became a convert. Access to AI had suddenly been democratised, and subject matter experts could develop solutions to solve a particular problem with relatively limited resources and no need for developers.

I set up IP Mind with co-founders Deepal Naidu and Oliver Schulte essentially to apply these new technologies to the problem of essentiality. My role was very much a strategic one, bringing an SEP expert’s perspective to the creation of the tools and ensuring that they would solve the day-to-day problems of practitioners.

There was a lot of heavy-lifting in the first year as we developed the architectures and claim-charting workflows that automated the identification, analysis and valuation of SEPs. Quality was paramount for us, and we did a huge amount of work looking at outputs, refining the models and eventually taking them out to industry for pilot projects.

We successfully took the product to market, and the company is now very much in the commercial phase, scaling up sales. It has now reached a stage where the strategic foundations are in place, and the focus is shifting towards commercial scaling. I just wasn’t needed in the same way. That created a natural moment for me to take on a new challenge.

And why Sisvel?

I have observed the patent pool space for a long time and have past experience at Via Licensing. What stands out to me about Sisvel is that it is incredibly adventurous and innovative in the way it goes about dealmaking. And there is a pragmatism as well – a real willingness to listen to both sides. That’s very unusual in this industry, even among pool operators. Frankly, as things stand, I don’t see any other way of bridging the gap in the SEP market, and Sisvel is one of the few companies evolving with the times and actually trying to do this.

You’ve worked in-house and you’ve also developed and sold AI tools to corporate IP teams. How should IP departments evaluate the many AI-driven offerings in the space?

You need to be cautious because among the providers in the SEP space, only a relatively small number currently offer solutions that meet the quality and reliability thresholds required for serious SEP work. The transparency of the tool is an important consideration. You need to understand how a system reasons and you need your highly skilled people to be able to check the output because even the best AI products hallucinate and get things wrong.

Beyond that, you need to be willing to engage in a refinement process where you iterate and improve over time, because that’s what AI is very good at. This means that you also need to set expectations with management, being clear from the outset that AI tools will not suddenly allow you to perform miracles. You also have to understand that AI works best in hybrid rollouts where it gradually takes over administrative work under the watchful eye of subject matter experts. This is core to what we are doing at Sisvel.

At a recent WIPO conference in Geneva, you questioned whether the industry truly wants the transparency it says it does. What did you mean by that?

I’ve put IP Mind’s essentiality tools in front of many of the biggest companies in tech. The pitch is claim-by-claim, evidence-based landscapes of which patents read on the standard and who owns them. In many cases, I sensed nervousness on the other side of the table, which you might articulate as: ‘If the landscape you generate doesn’t fit our narrative, that’s going to be a problem for us.’ It’s that simple.

Companies – licensors and licensees alike – want transparency if and only if it supports their existing positions. But in my view, greater clarity is coming, whether it’s wanted or not. There will be big opportunities for companies that embrace transparency and harness its benefits: narrower negotiation ranges, more reliable FRAND determinations and a fairer footing for smaller players.

How would you asses the progress of SEP owners and implementers in adopting and applying AI tools?

It’s still very early. There are some very big names that are surprisingly backward – companies that, given their overall technology capabilities, would shock you with their lack of AI adoption within IP.

A lot of companies have gone through this perfunctory process of appointing a head of AI. Often, though, they are starting with the wrong people: AI experts with no understanding of the IP world or people from an IP background who just don’t know where to begin with AI. Some companies run into trouble trying to build everything in-house. I think this space is inherently entrepreneurial and if you try to get salaried professionals to build this these tools, they probably won’t achieve much.

To summarize, my belief is that many organisations are still at the stage of talking about AI rather than operationalising it. There are some, though, even those with smaller IP teams, doing very impressive things. It’s only a matter of time before more companies start to work this technology out.

Quickfire questions...

What’s a typical weekend activity for you?

Time with my young son, Dashiel, combined with reading, and nowadays a little (bad) writing. I try to keep a balance between family life and intellectual pursuits.

What should someone with a free day in Barcelona make sure they see, do, eat?

Walk through the Eixample and up towards Gràcia, take in Gaudí’s architecture in its natural setting, and then have a long, unhurried lunch. I have lived here only a few months, but I learned very quickly that Barcelona rewards those who slow down!

Where is your favourite holiday destination?

Italy, without any hesitation, for its combination of history, culture and just daily life.

What’s the most memorable live performance you’ve witnessed?

It has to be a performance by Burt Bacharach accompanied by Joss Stone at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2019, which I attended with my daughter Tara. Although he appeared frail stepping onto the stage, once seated at the piano he lit the room and captivated us all for hours. A wonderful evening.

What’s your favourite TV series?

Probably Wolf Hall on the BBC, for its writing and Mark Rylance’s extraordinary performance as Thomas Cromwell. But I also have a long-standing love of the 1980s US TV comedy series Cheers, which is arguably some of the best comedy writing ever produced.

What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve received?

“They are only patents – nobody dies!” A reminder to keep perspective, even in high-stakes disputes, and never, ever make it personal.