Artificial Intelligence (AI) patents have made a strong comeback under the new 2019 Revised Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance. As the first graph above shows, allowances per office action have gone from an average of 15% before the guidance to 38% after the guidance. The increase occurred almost immediately after examiners were trained on the new guidance in January. For AI inventors concerned about the impact of the old Alice guidelines on the examination of AI-related applications, it looks like more hopeful times are ahead. The situation is grimmer for finance patents. The new guidance has not had any significant effect on allowances per office action. I reviewed a number of recent office actions under the new guidelines to see where the problem might be. It appears that most examiners in the finance art units 3691 to 3697 consider any improvement to a computer implemented financial process to be nothing more than an abstract idea. It doesn’t matter how novel or sophisticated the algorithms might be. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has been backing up this examiner perspective, with the affirmance rate for related appeals being more than 90%.

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