PwC Consulting forecasts that artificial intelligence's contribution to world gross domestic product will jump from $2 trillion in 2018 to $15.7 trillion by 2030.

The first artificial intelligence (A.I.) patents were issued in the 1950s for machine learning and grew steadily to 19,000 by 2013.  But the total number of A.I. patents almost tripled over the last five years to over 55,600.

This does not include another 256,456 worldwide patent publications for A.I. functional applications for biometrics, computer vision, natural language, information extraction, character recognition, scene understanding, and semantics.

The latest World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported that two United States companies lead the world in issued A.I. patents, with IBM holding 8,290 patents and Microsoft holding about 5,930 patents.  But China has become the fastest growing competitor by focusing on machine learning techniques of bio-inspired approaches, which draw from observations to develop vector machines and supervised learning.

According to senior partner Frank Chen at Silicon Valley's Andreessen Horowitz, A.I. development suffered decades of booms and busts that venture capitalists referred to as "summers and winters."  But the explosion in raw computer capacity in the last decade has allowed algorithms to leverage observances, to then make predictions on business, health, and legal matters.

PwC emphasizes that economic gains from A.I. could be highly dynamic, because they would ride on top of the 3-percent "baseline of long-term steady state economic growth" from "population growth, growth in the capital stock and technological change." 

The current global benefit from A.I. capabilities is estimated to be about $2 trillion from labor productivity, personalization, time saved, and quality.  Most A.I. in use today includes "digital assistants, chatbots and machine learning amongst others."

PwC forecasts that as "humans and machines collaborate more closely, and AI innovations come out of the research lab and into the mainstream, the transformational possibilities are staggering."  AI predicted that gains by 2030 will include $8 trillion from labor productivity, $4 trillion from personalization, and $4 trillion from quality.

PwC predicts that China will be the biggest A.I. winner, capturing 26 percent of benefits, or just over $4 trillion.  Although North America will reap only about 14.5 percent of all A.I. gains, or about $2.3 trillion, PwC believes that North America is expected to realize the A.I. benefits much faster than China.

With the A.I. research boom, potential A.I. gains could be as high as $19.7 trillion, including $3.7 trillion for health care, $3.7 trillion for automotive, $3.3 trillion for financial services, $3.2 trillion from transportation and logistics, $3.1 trillion for communications and entertainment, $3 trillion for retail, $2.2 trillion for energy, and $2.2 trillion for manufacturing.