Evaluating the disruption of COVID-19 on AI innovation using patent filings

Economists have long recognized that technological innovation is a key contributor to economic growth due to its impact on productivity. In this paper, we explore the impact of COVID-19 on innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand future effects on economic growth and productivity. Using patents as a measure of innovation and knowledge production, we analyze monthly patent application filing data from January 2015 to June 2021 to compare and assess trends. Past research has shown that growth in patents in the fields of AI have accelerated since 2012, with 6.5 times more annual filings occurring from 2006 to 2017. Here, we focus specifically on determining if the pandemic has had an impact on this acceleration in AI-related innovation. To accomplish this task we must confront the challenge in using up-to-date patent data for this kind of analysis due to the fact that there are considerable time lags associated with patent filing dates and their ultimate publication dates. In real-time situations such as COVID-19, it is, therefore, difficult to ascertain impact using the publicly available patenting data directly. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for examining existing and up-to-date publicly available patent filing data and use that method to gain new insights into the pandemic's effects on AI-related innovation. Our findings suggest that the pandemic has had a slowing impact on the rate of innovation in these areas but that the downturn may be reversing.