00:00:00:02 - 00:00:29:19
Grant McDonald
Welcome to The Banking on AI Podcast, where we explore the ideas shaping the future of banking and beyond. Today we're sitting down with John Lee, a true innovator at TD and a driving force behind our patent strategy. John is part of TD's Office of Patentable Innovation, a program that's been fueling creativity for over 20 years. He's filed multiple patents himself and knows firsthand how intellectual property powers progress for the Bank and for our clients.
00:00:29:21 - 00:00:48:14
Grant McDonald
I'm your host, Grant McDonald, and in this conversation, John shares why patents matter. How they spark innovation and what it takes to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.
00:00:48:16 - 00:01:03:15
Grant McDonald
John, thank you so much for being here. I think this conversation is going to be a really interesting one. You know, at the top of these podcasts, I always do a little intro and I introduce who we're chatting with that day. But I want to give you the opportunity to make sure I get what you do.
00:01:03:16 - 00:01:10:14
Grant McDonald
Right. So if you can walk me through what you do here at TD, that would be a really good place to start because I find it fascinating.
00:01:10:16 - 00:01:37:19
John S. Lee
Of course. So I'm currently Head of Patents for TD. And that means that I'm responsible for running the patent program within the businesses. As it occurs. I have responsibility across the entire enterprise. Every single segments and lines of businesses come to me when they have a brand-new idea to work on new projects, and I help them develop their patent strategies and actually interact with our legal firms and law firms in order to actually get those ideas to fruition.
00:01:37:19 - 00:01:39:17
John S. Lee
And for patent protection.
00:01:39:19 - 00:01:52:19
Grant McDonald
Now, I got to say, you know, not a small job, not a small role that you have that you play here at the Bank. What's the reaction that you get from people when you talk about patents? I don't know if people necessarily think TD Bank, patents or maybe they do.
00:01:52:21 - 00:02:26:22
John S. Lee
Well, surprisingly, those in the know are aware that TD is one of the largest filers of patents as a Canadian company. We actually, the only other company that competes with us in terms of numbers filed in Canada is actually Whitney Pratt, the engine manufacturer and, but those who may not always associate the Bank with technology or think of us as a tech technology firm, react sometimes surprised when, when I mention that I'm Head of Patent for a large bank, because their understanding of banking is very based in traditional understanding of the branch banking.
00:02:26:22 - 00:02:47:03
John S. Lee
Where you walk in, you talk to a teller and you process it. Yeah, unfortunately, that's no longer the case. Let's be honest. Technology is in every single area of our lives now, and every single one of those innovation, whether it's done by the bank or whether it's done by a technology company, can be protected by a patent.
00:02:47:05 - 00:03:07:04
Grant McDonald
When, when you step back for a moment and you're having conversations with people who are unsure that we even do this, I think the first question that I have on that is, why do we patent? Like what drives us to make patents? What role are patents playing in driving sort of innovations for clients and then for colleagues as well?
00:03:07:06 - 00:03:10:02
John S. Lee
Well, to answer the question, I do have to go back a little bit in history.
00:03:10:02 - 00:03:11:10
Grant McDonald
Okay. Perfect. We love history on the podcast.
00:03:11:10 - 00:03:33:08
John S. Lee
Because patents at TD, really started well over 20 years ago. And at the time where branch banking, where people would walk into the branch as a matter of course, was the thing to do. At the time, there used to be a process where you would go through the conversations with, your.
00:03:33:09 - 00:03:36:12
Grant McDonald
Kind of like a people manager at the time or something. You'd say, hey, I have this idea, what do I do with this ?
00:03:36:13 - 00:04:04:03
John S. Lee
Or I want to do something, and you would be required to go through all these forms, and all the forms would need to be printed. Our first patent was actually in 2006, related to aggregating, by technology, the entire file for a client and effectively allowing them to get a single delivery of those assets without ever requiring you to access multiple areas or multiple, applications.
00:04:04:03 - 00:04:06:10
Grant McDonald
Right. And that was the first patent that TD had put forward.
00:04:06:10 - 00:04:08:21
John S. Lee
First patent that we filed organically.
00:04:08:23 - 00:04:21:04
Grant McDonald
That is so interesting. I mean, this this bridges perfectly to the next question in terms of, you know, how does this type of thing, the patents being filed, the ideas coming forward, how does that kind of drive innovation throughout the Bank?
00:04:21:05 - 00:04:30:00
John S. Lee
So at the end of the day, it's a mindset and culture, when, at this bank, at TD Bank, we have about a thousand inventors right now.
00:04:30:02 - 00:04:33:05
Grant McDonald
That's a. So, to me that seems like a huge number.
00:04:33:07 - 00:04:35:03
John S. Lee
It is a massive number.
00:04:35:05 - 00:04:42:05
Grant McDonald
And when you when you say inventor, you don't just mean like someone like me, beinglike, I got a great idea. You mean someone who has an idea and it has been. It's a patent.
00:04:42:09 - 00:05:02:22
John S. Lee
Correct. So let me let me go back to that definition. To be an inventor, you must have come up with an idea, solved by technology and be able to describe it so that somebody else can implement it, and it has to be approved by a government to confirm that it is a net new technology that nobody else in the world had done before.
00:05:02:23 - 00:05:04:11
John S. Lee
That's what a patent is.
00:05:04:11 - 00:05:06:15
Grant McDonald
And 1% of our bank is currently doing that.
00:05:06:15 - 00:05:07:08
John S. Lee
Absolutely.
00:05:07:08 - 00:05:16:03
Grant McDonald
That, that. So to me, that just what you are building is harnessing the ideas of 100,000 people and they're coming to life and they're being patented.
00:05:16:05 - 00:05:21:06
John S. Lee
Absolutely. And it's, it's helping us to deliver those innovations to our client.
00:05:21:08 - 00:05:38:19
Grant McDonald
That's it. It starts here. We see real-time issues and we can act on them. So that's sort of to my next question, we bring AI into the conversation here. So you have ideas. And we talk about that first patent. It was paper-based because you saw an issue. Yeah. What does that look like now in terms of AI accelerating.
00:05:38:19 - 00:05:41:04
Grant McDonald
Sort of like the innovation at the Bank?
00:05:41:06 - 00:05:58:15
John S. Lee
The reality is that the thinking on AI is so much faster and the rate of innovation is so much faster than it ever was before. And because our rate of innovation is so fast, we have to ensure that we protect the innovations that we come up with in order to service our clients better.
00:05:58:17 - 00:06:15:23
Grant McDonald
I see, so when you're looking at those ideas, and, you know, as you mentioned, before we sat down here, patents are they become public information pretty quickly. So I'd love to be able to, to dive into a little bit of some of the AI solutions that you've seen patented and what, what kind of jumps out at you.
00:06:16:01 - 00:06:39:10
John S. Lee
You know absolutely. I think a great example is actually AI Prism, a recent, product that we discussed and we launched around foundation models.The ability to actually leverage foundation models that we've developed at the Bank in order to service our clients is really, really powerful. It's currently protected by over 40 patents that we've been filing over, over the last three to four years.
00:06:39:10 - 00:06:39:23
John S. Lee
Wow.
00:06:40:00 - 00:06:56:00
Grant McDonald
So, I got to dive in a little bit more because someone hears that term that here TD AI Prism. Explain it to me like I've never heard about AI, I have never heard about TD. I think of prism as a light, like you walk me through what TD AI, like what the Prism is today.
00:06:56:00 - 00:07:21:02
John S. Lee
TD AI Prism is really the underlying model by which we make determination. We make decisions. Technologies are all over the place. They exist in very different, various scales of, of delivery, shallwe call them.. And what AI Prism does is really distill the information that comes in and we allow it to shine a light to what conclusions we want to reach.
00:07:21:04 - 00:07:38:04
John S. Lee
And so what AI Prism does is that it leverages the set of, of AI models that our colleagues have been working on, and packages it in a way that can relate that information in order to come up with an answer that is contextual and personalized to those individuals.
00:07:38:09 - 00:08:00:09
Grant McDonald
That is fascinating. So we look at an example like that. We look at the examples again, a thousand colleagues, a thousand employees of TD Bankhave patents? We are one of the top patent filers in the country. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the top bank. So you are getting a ton of ideas coming through. How do you decide where to focus?
00:08:00:09 - 00:08:03:10
Grant McDonald
How do you decide yeah, we're going to invest in this. We're moving forward on this.
00:08:03:10 – 00:08:40:11
John S. Lee
The number of ideas I get is uncanny because my inbox is always full. And every colleague, I mean, they always have an idea. They always want to talk to me or somebody on my team. And, and for us, this is the wealth of the ideas and the culture that we would we want to encourage here, where everybody has a great idea, everybody knows who to talk to.
Our job is to support and foster those ideas, because sometimes not every idea rise up to the level of, hey, this is actually net new to the world, right?
00:08:40:11 - 00:08:40:19
Grant McDonald
Yes.
00:08:40:19 - 00:08:54:14
John S. Lee
This is novel to the world. So we help focus and we help define and refine that idea to a point where we can actually have the conversation of saying, hey, these technology stacks, the way that we describe it, that is what's new, and that's how we can protect it.
00:08:54:15 – 00:09:07:04
Grant McDonald
There is this thing called Evident AI. I I'd love for you to walk us through what it is. It ranks. It's an Index and kind of where TD is on it.
How we're doing overall?
00:09:07:06 - 00:09:41:12
John S. Lee
Of course. It's an interesting world where technology is such a broad base where we don't understand what everybody else is working on. The reality is, is that there needs to be some level of harmonization and standardization. What Evident AI is, is it's the ability to distill publicly available data to effectively create a ranking. Patents, being a publicly available source of information around what innovation every single bank is doing, was a big proponent of how Evident was calculated.
00:09:41:14 - 00:09:55:13
John S. Lee
TD is doing extremely well. I mean, we have about 2,900 patents filed since about 2019 about which by 950 of those are AI.
00:09:55:15 - 00:10:09:07
Grant McDonald
950 of that number are AI-specific. So what does that look like in terms of that trend? Is that going to do you think that's going to just grow and grow and grow or like is it going to be related to other things coming that we can't even imagine at this point?
00:10:09:09 - 00:10:37:18
John S. Lee
I think the reality is that there's going to be a confluence where AI now starts becoming the base technology where everything else gets built. And so the interesting part about that for us is that as the Office of Patentable Innovation, most of what we see is ahead of the realities of what everyone else sees in the world. And because we're able to gain insights on what's happening.
John S. Lee
Yes, there are going to be some, some really interesting conjoining of technologies in the future.
00:10:37:20 - 00:10:41:16
Grant McDonald
That's great and Evident keeps us all sort of in track in terms of how everyone's doing.
00:10:41:18 - 00:10:55:06
John S. Lee
Exactly, and we are doing extremely well. We have been tracking extremely well. We're one of the top patent filers and research organizations when it comes to AI. And the interesting part about that is that it is a global index.
00:10:55:10 - 00:11:10:08
Grant McDonald
Now, I want to talk about you for a second because you yourself are an inventor. You're a patent holder. Can you kind of walk me through like what you would describe the mindset that you bring forward to ensure that you're able to, to do the work that you want to do?
00:11:10:10 - 00:11:36:00
John S. Lee
No. Absolutely. So yes, I'm lucky enough that in my career I've managed to become, a very prolific inventor in my own right. Which has been amazing and TD has been very supportive of that. The mindset of an inventor is one that focuses on curiosity and the ability to question everything, because it isn't enough to be the technically most prolific person and the most efficient person.
00:11:36:02 - 00:11:44:20
John S. Lee
It really is. Important to question why? Question why hasn't been done another way? Because in answering the why is where the patent lie.
00:11:44:22 - 00:12:02:18
Grant McDonald
When you talk to other colleagues about that mindset, how do you ensure that you can pass that along to them? It's one thing you, you clearly have it. You have the curiosity to dive in. Do you have to change the mindset? Is AI helping change that mindset where people are saying, hey, I can I can maybe get some answers here and I can put my idea forward?
00:12:02:20 - 00:12:28:21
John S. Lee
Oh, it absolutely is. It's actually fascinating. About three years ago, when the entire agentic AI, gen AII kind of revolution happened, what started happening is our colleagues started asking the question, well, why can't I do this using AI? What does that look like? And they will come up with some really fascinating solutions to their mundane problems all the way to the super complex they had never been able to be solve.
00:12:28:23 - 00:12:38:21
John S. Lee
What's interesting about that is my role is to ask the question, well, why hasn't been done this before? And what are you doing that's different? That allows us to claim that this is new?
00:12:38:23 - 00:12:56:06
Grant McDonald
So, you know, John, I always like to sort of wrap these conversations up by talking about the couple different areas. There's people that are very concerned about AI. There are people who are kind of on the fence, don't necessarily think about it too much. And then those others are saying, this is the future. This is where we're going.
00:12:56:08 - 00:13:02:17
Grant McDonald
From your perspective, what kind of gets you excited about the future of innovation, of patents and, and AI?
00:13:02:19 - 00:13:42:03
John S. Lee
The thing that gets me the most excited about AI and patents, realistically, is that there's, there's been such a rate of acceleration in any technology revolutionthe first signal that that that a revolution is occurring is, you see, almost a hockey stick effect on the number of patents being filed. In AI, that has blown every other previous revolution, technology revolution out of the water, the number of patents being filed globally around AI keeps increasing, and really interesting to see what that means for both the inventor community and the companies that are actually participating in this.
00:13:42:05 - 00:13:53:05
Grant McDonald
So interesting. John, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. I'm excited to see some more patents from you in the future. More patents across TD, and I think the future is going to be really interesting around that. So, thank you again.
00:13:53:05 - 00:13:54:18
John S. Lee
Of course. Thank you for having me. This has been great.
Want to learn more about Innovation?