Artificial Intelligence and Trade Secrets
| Author | Jessica M. Meyers |
| Position | Jessica M. Meyers is an attorney at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. She specializes in patent law, particularly as it relates to artificial intelligence technologies. She can be reached at jmeyers@microsoft.com. |
| Pages | 19-23 |
Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 11, Number 3, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.
This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.
ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
By Jessica M. Meyers
A
rticial intelligence (AI) didn’t come like we expected. It came more gently, quieter. We
had been conditioned to fear the Terminator, HAL, and the singularity. Instead, AI has more
subtly become part of our daily lives. We may wake up to an alarm that is triggered at an
optimal time during our sleep cycle; check the day’s weather and our estimated commute
time, which is updated in real time as we travel to work; and search for a variety of
information throughout the day, whether on our smartphone or laptop.
AI is no longer a niche research area in the tech industry. It is seeing widespread adoption across
industries, changing the way we live, work, and relate to each other. AI is becoming useful wherever
“intelligence” itself has always been useful. However, we are just starting to see the technological
advances that are possible with AI, not to mention the implications of AI for other disciplines, such as
intellectual property (IP), privacy, and other areas of legal and social importance. As IP practitioners,
we may be surprised to nd trade secrets increasingly entering the conversation, as many of us have
been practicing for decades blissfully unaware of how trade secrets operate.
Technological, legal, and other considerations have created a present environment particularly well
suited for both AI and trade secrets, and there is a general complementariness between the two. How they
are used will have consequences for the workplace, the individual, and the progress of innovation itself.
TRADE
SECRETS
AND
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