First Global Forum on Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence

Driven by rapid advances in computing power and access to data, AI has evolved from a specialized technology with largely theoretical applications into an increasingly powerful force shaping many facets of everyday life. This dynamic keynote presentation will explore what may come next, and what AI’s advancing capabilities could mean for societies, economies and governments, highlighting the opportunities, risks, implications and transformative potential ahead.

AI in Action will bring the transformative potential of AI to life through real-world storytelling by innovators, entrepreneurs and creators from different regions and generations. The first showcase will spotlight how AI innovation is addressing global challenges. It will demonstrate how AI can help scientists and innovators approach previously intractable problems, accelerate discovery and develop solutions with the potential to benefit people and communities worldwide.

IP sits at the heart of many of the choices shaping AI, yet it is too often treated as an afterthought or left to technical specialists. This presentation will explore how to build greater IP fluency across the AI ecosystem and make IP more understandable, relevant and accessible to policymakers and other stakeholders. The ambition is IP for everyone, everywhere - moving IP beyond the domain of specialists and into the wider AI conversations.

As AI transforms how we create, innovate and access knowledge, does the rationale underpinning the IP system still hold? Returning to first principles, this panel will examine the legal, economic and broader societal rationales for IP, from incentivizing creativity and innovation and promoting knowledge dissemination to supporting economic development, cultural preservation, and the public interest. Drawing on available evidence and diverse perspectives, the discussion will test established balances around incentives, competition, and access. Ultimately, it will ask whether the IP system remains fit for purpose, or whether some of its foundations need to be rethought.

What picture emerges when we connect the dots using IP data? Long before ChatGPT captured the world’s attention, the signals behind the generative AI boom were hiding in plain sight. The numbers were telling a story, but were we listening? By revealing where innovation is concentrated, which industries and applications are gaining momentum and where new patterns are emerging, IP data offers a unique window into the evolution of AI. This presentation will explore how those insights can help us see the innovation landscape taking shape, spot emerging technologies as they gather momentum and stay one step ahead of the next breakthroughs shaping tomorrow.

The second showcase will highlight how SMEs everywhere are using AI to address immediate and tangible challenges. It will demonstrate how locally grounded innovation can respond to the realities of developing countries, expand access to practical solutions and deliver meaningful impact for communities globally.

With developments in AI and IP unfolding across jurisdictions and multiple fronts, keeping track of what matters is increasingly challenging. This one-stop shop of short presentations will offer a concise overview of key developments shaping the AI and IP landscape. It will highlight significant legal decisions, including those from courts and IP offices; developments in law and regulation; and developments in the private sector, including licensing approaches, commercial agreements and emerging business models. Focusing on a selection of defining developments from around the world, the presentations will consider why they matter, the questions they raise, and what they may signal for the evolving relationship between AI and IP.

AI is challenging not only what humans make, but increasingly what makes us human. As synthetic representations of name, image, likeness and voice become increasingly lifelike, and the use of biometric data expands, protection remains fragmented across jurisdictions and areas of law. Could IP offer a more coherent response? This panel discussion will explore whether and how the IP system could be shaped to protect human characteristics in the age of AI, including the potential for new or adapted rights, their scope and enforcement, and where their limits should lie. It will consider the policy choices involved in developing an effective and balanced IP framework that protects not only what humans make, but what makes us human.

What happens when AI becomes not only the product of research, but a tool for advancing it? From writing code and running experiments to optimizing training systems and discovering new algorithms, AI is already entering its own development loop. This could compress timelines and make progress faster, less predictable and more difficult to understand—even for those building the systems. Drawing on first-hand experience at the forefront of industry, this keynote presentation will offer a glimpse into emerging capabilities and the technological developments that will define the next frontier of AI.

The third showcase will give the stage to a young innovator from the emerging, AI-native generation. It will demonstrate how young people are using AI as a tool for exploration, experimentation and entrepreneurship, bringing fresh perspectives to complex challenges and turning ambitious ideas into real-world solutions.

AI is transforming how IP offices operate and the environment in which they serve users. Heads of IP Offices will compare what they are seeing at the filing gate and how they are deploying AI across search, examination, classification and service delivery. Looking beyond patent examination, the discussion will consider the administrative and workflow implications of AI across patents, trademarks, designs and copyright registries. From changing filing patterns and expanding prior art to trust, skills, access and cooperation, it will explore how offices with differing resources and capabilities can harness AI, share capacity and safeguard quality across the IP system. Ultimately, the session will ask: what does a future-ready IP office look like?

Building on the Super Session this presentation moves from discussion to deployment. Hear directly from those designing and implementing AI tools across search, examination, classification and service delivery, and discover what it takes to turn technological promise into practical improvements in efficiency, quality and user experience.

As creators and innovators increasingly incorporate AI into their work, how should the IP system treat the resulting outputs? Reflecting on real-world uses in creative and innovative processes, this panel discussion will explore the evolving relationship between human and AI contributions. Bringing copyright and patent perspectives into dialogue, it will examine the similarities and differences between authorship and inventorship, the role of human and machine contribution, and how the existing IP framework, which was built on a human-centered foundation, is responding to AI outputs.

The fourth showcase will bring the creative process to the stage through a live demonstration of a creator working with AI. It will reveal the human choices, experimentation and imagination behind the process, showing how AI can open new possibilities for creative expression while keeping the creator at the center.

Debates around the development of AI models have often proceeded along separate tracks: copyright and access to training data on one side, and patents and other forms of protection for AI models and related technologies on the other. Yet as the boundaries between software, hardware and data blur, these questions increasingly overlap. For example, a model used for medical diagnosis may embody a patentable invention while having been trained using copyright-protected images, sound recordings or other material. Moving beyond established arguments, this panel discussion will explore how choices concerning training inputs, model protection, open-source, open-weight and closed approaches, and real-world applications interact, and how IP policy decisions in one area can have consequences across the wider IP ecosystem.

What will be on the agenda a year from now, and further into the future? Looking beyond today’s debates, this forward-looking panel will explore the emerging developments, unanswered questions and biggest uncertainties that could reshape the relationship between IP and AI. Bringing together diverse perspectives, the discussion will offer informed predictions, identify the signals worth watching and surface issues not yet on the agenda but which may define the debates of tomorrow.