Efficiency of Patent Examination will be improved by adopting Artificial Intelligence

It is announced that the JPO will start demonstration experiment of patent examination using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the next fiscal year. It is reported that automation will be promoted this summer in the field of classification of inventions or collection of preceding patent information under the cooperation of a Japanese IT company, NTT DATA Corporation.

More than 500,000 applications of patent, utility model, design and trademark are filed with the JPO every year. Under such circumstances, the JPO intends to shorten the period for granting patents by half by adopting AI technology and improving the efficiency of patent examination process.

According to the announcement, they will consider adopting AI technology in the field of receipt of applications, formality examination, classification and substantive examination. They will break tasks in each field into multiple and smaller processes, and consider whether efficiency of each process can be improved or not by using AI, also in the viewpoint of cost-effectiveness.

They are planning to make a test installation into the processes where AI is judged to bbe useful in improving the efficiency of each process, with the aim of achieving the goal by the next fiscal year.

Reported by Yoko MIYAMOTO, Japanese Patent Attorney