One assignee leads the ranked field with 417 records out of 2,255 in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked company at 65 records and the tenth at 39. That leader’s filings are concentrated in networked analytics and industrial-IoT platform claims rather than in traditional control hardware. Because the ranking includes 100 companies total, the leader’s share represents roughly a fifth of the whole corpus, and the top five combined hold 43.6% of all records — so due diligence on this space should start with, but not stop at, the single largest filer.

Filing volume peaked at 297 records in 2018 and has trended down since, reaching 29 in 2026, though that final year is only partially reported. Using the most recent span that can be treated as complete, filings fell from 150 in 2021 to 89 in 2024, a -41% change. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the last two or three years in any chart will always look lower than the true filing rate turns out to be, so a slowdown reading should rely on 2024 and earlier data, not on 2025 or 2026 figures.

Digital information transmission, IPC class H04L, appears in 56.9% of the 2,255 records in scope, ahead of control and regulating systems (G05B) at 39.2% and electric digital data processing (G06F) at 23.8%. AI-related computing (G06N) already reaches 16.4% of records, close to wireless communication networks (H04W) at 15.3%. Because records often carry multiple IPC codes, these percentages overlap and add to more than 100%, but the ranking itself shows the field’s centre of gravity has moved toward data transmission and AI-assisted interpretation rather than staying purely in control-loop mechanics.