As artificial intelligence has become an important driving force in various fields, including finance, healthcare and education, experts have suggested that the technology be applied in intellectual property services to advance innovation.

Domestic and foreign experts from government agencies, enterprises and universities made the suggestion during a forum themed "Empowered with AI, IP services Connecting Innovation" at the 12th China Intellectual Property Annual Conference in Jinan, Shandong province, last month.

While embracing the rapid development of AI, the experts also discussed how they are incorporating the technology into their work and called for greater efforts to further improve the digitization of public IP services.

Julie Herve, an IP counselor who works for the IP management department of the French Embassy in Beijing, introduced an AI tool used for classifying patent applications, saying that it can not only save a lot of time on labor, but also can improve classification accuracy.

Every week, her office receives about 300 patent applications and has to categorize them in line with the content. It then sends the applications to different teams for further review.

Herve said in the past, the work was quite time-consuming.

"Because it was done manually, it was also very prone to errors," she said.

Thanks to the AI tool, Herve's team can save 20 hours a week on the task.

Lin Songtao, co-founder of Beijing Mengzhiwang Technology — an IP services provider known as China's "IP Master" — said that AI has played a major role in making their services digital and smart over the past few years, and also has contributed to industrial development.

"Based on trademark data, for example, we've applied the technology in the establishment of an online platform to help enterprises look for relevant information more conveniently," he said, revealing that about 1 million users have registered on the platform.

"Some IP agents told us they've saved time and labor costs after using our services and products, and some said our intelligent applications have made their handling of IP affairs more efficient, which has also helped them attract more clients," he added.

Li Yetao, operations director of Beijing Dawei Software Technology, said that it has also increased research on AI to optimize its IP services, but he regarded AI as an assistant, saying that "we won't rely solely on it to solve all our problems."

The experts' suggestions came on the heels of a newly released plan issued by the China National Intellectual Property Administration.

While urging further improvement in the digitalization of IP services, the administration's plan also calls for more efforts to accelerate the establishment of national integrated public digital service platforms, increase the supply of data resources and public information service products, and help market-oriented data service agencies further develop.