AI and ML Patents By the Numbers

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 14,838 patents that mentioned artificial intelligence or machine learning in 2019, roughly double the issuance in 2018, writes Al AuYeung, an IP attorney at Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt. The average time it took from filing to issuance was 850 days. The patent that took the longest to issue was No. 10410308, System, method, and device for personal medical care, intelligent analysis, and diagnosis. It took 4,530 days. The fastest issuance was No. 10470510, Systems and Methods for Full Body Measurements Extraction Using Multiple Deep Learning Networks for Body Feature Measurements. It took only 94 days. IBM received 81 of those patents, Microsoft received 56, Amazon 51. Among non-Big Tech firms, Capital One received 50, Fanuc Corp received 36, Accenture received 21, and Bank of America received 15 AI/ML patents. Artificial intelligence augmentation will create $2.9 trillion of business value and $6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally by 2021, according to Gartner. McKinsey forecasts additional economic output of around $13 trillion by 2030, boosting global GDP by about 1.2 percent a year.