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Like almost every business owner and operator I talk to right now, my clients and I have been moving fast to adapt AI into workflows, into products, into how we make decisions. And somewhere in the middle of that push, a question started nagging at me that I couldn’t shake.
If I’m building something new on top of AI — a process, a workflow, a piece of proprietary logic that gives my business an edge — how do I protect it? Not protect it in theory. Protect it for real, in a world where a competitor can watch what I do and rebuild it in a fraction of the time it took me to build it the first time.
I started asking around. That search is what led me to a gentleman named Richard Spitz.
Richard is the Managing Director of Strong Force Innovation Portfolios. By my own count, and by what I’ve been able to verify independently, Richard and his team are among the most prolific inventors, strategists, technologists, and patent writers working in this space today. Publicly, Strong Force talks about its estate in the thousands of patents — and even that is a real, verifiable number. Richard described the current portfolio as approximately a thousand patent assets, averaging around four hundred fifty pages per application — and noted that Strong Force has only claimed a small percentage of what could be claimed, with the firm on track to reach ten thousand patents with the right opportunities. They saw the convergence of AI and enterprise architecture coming years ago and started writing application-layer AI patents specifically for it, long before most of the market understood there was anything worth protecting there.
Here’s a comparison that made the scale of it real for me. I spent twenty-three years at Rockwell Automation — the global leader in industrial automation, full stop. Richard walked me through Strong Force’s own patent landscape charts, category by category, and in several of the specific AI-driven industrial categories they track, Strong Force’s portfolio outpaced Rockwell’s. Not everywhere, and not by accident — those are the categories Strong Force targeted deliberately. I say it because it’s the fastest way I know to make the scale of what Strong Force has built register for another operator, and I say it with real respect for Rockwell, a company I gave over two decades to.
So, I called him. What follows is our conversation — what Richard shared with me, and, section by section, what I took away from it.
THE FIRST THING I ASKED HIM was simple: with AI moving this fast, what actually still protects a business?
RICHARD SPITZ, Managing Director, Strong Force Innovation Portfolios:
“For decades, companies protected their position through software, proprietary workflows, trade secrets, specialized labor, customer relationships, and operational scale. Those advantages still matter, but AI is weakening many of them at the same time. Software can be built faster. Features can be copied more quickly. Expertise can be automated. Workflows can be inferred. The question is no longer simply whether a company will adopt AI — it’s whether it can adopt AI without surrendering the assets that make it valuable in the first place.”
SO, HERE’S WHAT I’M TELLING YOU
Adopt AI or fall behind — but adopt it carelessly and you give away the very things that made you valuable.
Whoever Controls the Architecture, Wins the Enterprise
Partway through our conversation, Richard pointed me to something I hadn’t seen yet: Alex Karp’s combative CNBC appearance from July 1, 2026. For anyone who doesn’t follow the AI industry closely — Karp is the co-founder and CEO of Palantir, the data and analytics company built around helping large enterprises and governments run their own data and models under their own control. He went on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” ostensibly to talk about a new partnership with Nvidia, and instead delivered an unscripted, pretty heated argument that enterprises are quietly losing their own intellectual property and competitive edge to the AI vendors they pay for tokens. At one point he put it as bluntly as it gets: “the jig is up.”
WATCH THIS FIRST — IT’S THE PROOF POINT Richard called this a must-see for any business owner or CEO thinking seriously about protecting their intellectual property in the AI era — especially if that IP is your single greatest asset. Watch the full interview, or simply search “Alex Karp CNBC Squawk Box July 2026” and you’ll find it immediately. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/01/watch-palantir-ceo-alex-karp-on-new-nvidia-deal.html |
Richard used the clip as a proof point, not a talking point. His view: if the CEO of one of the most sophisticated data companies in the world is saying this in public, on live television, it’s already happening quietly at every enterprise that hasn’t thought about who controls its AI architecture. Richard took the argument further than Karp did.
RICHARD SPITZ, Managing Director, Strong Force Innovation Portfolios:
“Model access and token consumption alone will not produce durable returns. Economic value is created by embedding AI into enterprise data, workflows, decisions, products, and operations. That makes control the central issue. Enterprises must control what data AI can access, how proprietary context is applied, which models and tools are used, what agents are authorized to do, how decisions are executed, and who retains the intelligence generated from the results. Without that control, AI can improve efficiency while quietly weakening the enterprise’s own differentiation.”
SO, HERE’S WHAT I’M TELLING YOU
It’s not who has the best model — it’s who controls how AI touches the business.
Your Moat Isn’t the Code Anymore
This is the part that hit closest to home for me. I’ve always thought of the software and workflows my firm builds as the asset. Richard pushed back on that framing.
RICHARD SPITZ, Managing Director, Strong Force Innovation Portfolios:
“AI is rapidly reducing the scarcity value of software development. Products, features, and workflows that once required large teams and years to build can now be created, replicated, and improved much faster. That doesn’t eliminate the value of software — it changes where durable value resides. Competitive advantage moves away from code alone and toward the architecture that controls how AI operates inside the business. Companies that deploy the same models and tools as everyone else risk becoming a more efficient version of the same commodity.”
SO, HERE’S WHAT I’M TELLING YOU
Code stopped being the moat — the architecture wrapped around the AI is the new one.
This tracks with something I’ve watched happen in real time: Salesforce, and plenty of other SaaS companies, effectively got commoditized within a matter of months once AI models could replicate what their software did. Owning code was never, by itself, intellectual property protection — it was a head start. AI just collapsed how long that head start lasts. Patents are a different kind of asset entirely, because they don’t depend on staying ahead. They depend on ownership.
Contracts and Secrecy Won’t Save You
Naturally, I asked the obvious follow-up: can’t I just handle this with airtight contracts and good old-fashioned confidentiality?
RICHARD SPITZ, Managing Director, Strong Force Innovation Portfolios:
“Contracts allocate rights among identified parties, but they don’t bind the rest of the market. They can’t prevent independent development, lawful reverse engineering, or use by parties outside the relationship. Trade secrets become less durable too, as AI improves the ability to analyze system behavior, infer operating methods, and accelerate alternative implementations. Patents are different — they create property rights in the architecture itself, and they apply even when a competitor built something independently and took nothing from you directly.”
SO, HERE’S WHAT I’M TELLING YOU
Promises on paper and secrets in a drawer won’t hold — only ownership does.
What Strong Force Actually Owns
At this point I wanted specifics. What, exactly, does Strong Force’s patent estate cover?
RICHARD SPITZ, Managing Director, Strong Force Innovation Portfolios:
“A massive, one-of-one patent estate covering the control architecture through which AI operates inside the enterprise — how it accesses enterprise data, applies proprietary context, selects models and tools, governs agents, executes workflows, interacts with connected systems, audits outcomes, and retains derived intelligence. The estate extends across enterprise AI, agentic orchestration, digital twins, connected sensors, workflow automation, and software-defined equipment. These aren’t isolated products — they’re components of a common architecture through which data becomes intelligence, intelligence becomes authorized action, and action becomes feedback.”
SO, HERE’S WHAT I’M TELLING YOU
Strong Force doesn’t own a product in the AI stack — it owns the control layer underneath all of them.
Not a Bet on One Winner
I asked Richard how Strong Force thinks about risk — picking the wrong horse in a fast-moving market seems like the obvious danger for any IP play like this.
RICHARD SPITZ, Managing Director, Strong Force Innovation Portfolios:
“Strong Force isn’t dependent on selecting one winning product, model, platform, or vertical. A conventional software company has to choose a market, build a product, acquire customers, and defend it against increasingly rapid imitation. Our value rests on ownership of the underlying architecture that multiple products, platforms, and industries require — and those products can be built by us, by partners, by licensees, or by other market participants entirely. The strategic value lies in controlling the architecture beneath all of them.”
SO, HERE’S WHAT I’M TELLING YOU
This isn’t a bet on one winner — it’s a toll booth underneath all of them.
Why You Can’t Value This the Normal Way
Given all that, I asked the question every investor eventually asks: what is this actually worth, and how would anyone price it?
RICHARD SPITZ, Managing Director, Strong Force Innovation Portfolios:
“Strong Force doesn’t fit conventional valuation frameworks. Software valuations focus on revenue, customers, and growth. Patent valuations often focus on narrower portfolios tied to established products. Neither captures a broad, early, system-level estate positioned across the architecture businesses increasingly need to survive AI-driven change. A one-of-one asset isn’t valued by asking what similar companies sold for — it’s valued by asking what control of it is worth to each potential buyer: what revenues it protects, what markets it enables, what dependencies it removes, what leverage it creates, and what happens if a competitor acquires it first.”
SO, HERE’S WHAT I’M TELLING YOU
Don’t price it like a portfolio — price it like the risk of losing it to someone else.
THE BOTTOM LINE — KIP DODSON In my opinion, Strong Force is positioned better than almost anything else I’ve come across in the asset world right now. It is, plainly, the alpha in applied AI intellectual property — not because of one clever patent, but because of how broadly and how early they’ve written the application-layer patents that sit underneath the entire AI build-out, and because they’re positioned to keep doing exactly that as new industries come online. So the real question isn’t whether this work is legitimate. I checked. It is, and it’s easy to verify. The real question is narrower and more personal: are they already doing this in your industry — or not yet? I’m genuinely blown away by the scope of what Richard and his team have built. This conversation is why I wanted to write this down. I’m also a strong believer in the scientific method. So I’m treating everything above as a thesis, not a conclusion — which means I’m actively trying to prove myself wrong as I keep digging into this. If you’d like to compare notes, push back, or just talk it through, I’d genuinely welcome it. Reach me at kip@dodsonmc.com or on my cell at 615-717-7616. |
ABOUT RICHARD SPITZ • Co-Founder and Managing Director of Strong Force, leading the Markets team • Brings strategic insight, market analysis, and global perspective to the categories Strong Force anticipates and leads. • Former Chairman of the Global Technology Market at Korn/Ferry International (NYSE: KFY). • Board member and advisor to numerous public, private, and entrepreneurial technology companies. • Provides Strong Force with an extensive senior-level network and a deep understanding of emerging technologies, platforms, ecosystems, and market dynamics Richard co-leads Strong Force as well as leads a team of experienced private equity, venture capital, intellectual property, and corporate development professionals. His extensive operating experience and C-suite relationships help keep Strong Force closely aligned with the forces shaping its target markets. |
ABOUT KIP DODSON • Industrial data systems engineer with nearly 30 years in enterprise data management • Started his career as a data systems analyst at Walt Disney World, then spent 23 years at Rockwell Automation, the global leader in industrial automation • His Rockwell team’s control-system work was recognized with a company award — including deployments for the U.S. Department of Energy’s uranium processing facility and the U.S. Department of Defense’s global missile defense system • Served as global automation systems architecture lead for Mars, Incorporated (M&M’S) • Founder of EmpowerLocal, built into the largest data platform for small and mid-tier publishers, powering digital advertising and publishing across more than 2,500 publishers nationwide • Also owns Moments Spa & Salon in Franklin, Tennessee, and founded Digital Basics Score, a tool that benchmarks a small business’s online performance against local competitors Kip’s background across industrial automation, government-grade control systems, and enterprise data is why he went looking for a real answer to the AI-and-IP question in the first place — and why he didn’t take Strong Force’s claims at face value. |
Kip Dodson is the founder of Dodson Management Consulting. This piece reflects his personal perspective following a conversation with Richard Spitz of Strong Force Innovation Portfolios.
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