WIPO Technology Trends 2019: Artificial Intelligence

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) published recently its first report in a new flagship series: WIPO Technology Trends, this first edition features Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the theme.

The main insights and trends in AI techniques and application fields, and patenting activity are summarized below.

AI-related inventions are booming, shifting from theory to commercial application:

Since AI emerged in the 1950s, innovators and researchers have filed nearly 340.000 patent applications and published over 1.6 million scientific publications.

Notably, AI-related patenting is growing rapidly: over half of the identified inventions have been published since 2013.

Some areas of AI are growing more quickly than others:

Machine learning is the dominant AI technique disclosed in patents and is included in more than one-third of all identified inventions (134.777 patent documents).

The machine learning techniques revolutionizing AI are deep learning and neural networks, and these are the fastest growing AI techniques in terms of patent filings.

Among AI functional applications, computer vision, which includes image recognition, is the most popular, followed by AI for robotics and control methods.

Many AI patents include inventions that can be applied in different industries:

AI-related patents not only disclose AI techniques and applications, they often also refer to an application field or industry. Twenty application fields were identified in the report, these include in order of magnitude: Telecommunications, Transportation, Life and Medical sciences, Human-Computer Interaction, Banking, Security, Agriculture and Networks (including social networks, smart cities and the Internet of Things).

Companies, in particular those from Japan, USA and China, dominated patenting activity:

Companies represent 26 out of the top 30 AI patent applicants, while only four are universities or public...