If you're a vertical SaaS company adding AI capabilities to your product, you might assume that using off-the-shelf models means there's nothing to patent. But your domain expertise—encoded in how you fine-tune, prompt, validate, and integrate AI—often represents patentable innovation that deserves protection.

Domain Expertise as Technical Innovation

Vertical SaaS companies possess deep knowledge about their industries—knowledge that general-purpose AI models lack. When you translate this expertise into technical systems, you're creating innovations that can be protected.

Consider a legal tech company that builds an AI contract review system. The underlying LLM is generic, but the system that identifies which clauses to flag, understands jurisdiction-specific requirements, and knows which issues are deal-breakers for different transaction types—that's patentable innovation built on domain expertise.

Identifying Your Patentable Innovations

Look for places where your AI implementation differs from what a general developer would build:

• Industry-specific data preprocessing or normalization techniques
• Custom evaluation metrics that reflect domain quality standards
• Validation layers that catch industry-specific errors
• Integration patterns with existing industry workflows or systems
• Novel approaches to handling domain-specific edge cases

The Competitive Moat

Patents protect your investment in domain-specific AI development. As horizontal AI companies inevitably try to expand into your vertical, your patent portfolio creates barriers that slow their entry and force them to develop alternative approaches—or negotiate with you.