The Kiwi trademark is an iconic symbol of trust in New Zealand Made products, services and code. Unfortunately, we often find instances of companies using the trademark without the proper licence, most of the time without any malice intended.
But it is important that the NZ Made trademark is kept secure. We want consumers to know that when they buy products bearing the Kiwi, those products are definitely made here.
Our previous trademark breach strategy was to have real people pouring over hundreds of websites and databases to find illegitimate uses of the Kiwi. It was an important job, albeit inefficient. But when we started to get to know our NZ Code AI companies a little better, we knew we had a chance to smarten up the process.
The Concept
AI tech has become increasingly advanced and affordable over recent years, in many different fields. After having a chat with Asa Cox, CEO of Arcanum for A Kiwi Original, we decided to ask if his team could have a crack at creating an AI that can spot illegitimate uses of the Kiwi across the internet. A Kiwi Spotter.
This would drastically reduce the hours our team spends on the arduous task of investigating trademark breaches and give this task to a machine, which it be far more suited to. Asa agreed and a few weeks later we had a prototype.
The Logo Hunter
Asa sat us down in a Zoom call to take a look at what the Kiwi Spotter could do. We fed the AI a few webpages to crawl and then...it was a bit like magic.
Not only could the Kiwi spotter find the logo on a webpage, it could examine product images and find the logo images inside those images or locate Kiwis without the iconic triangle. We were pretty chuffed. Once we integrated our database of license holders into the Logo spotter, it became even easier to check whether a given company was able to use the logo or not.
Some of the best uses of AI are for replacing the tasks that are tedious or you perhaps don't want to do. AI is rapidly advancing in terms of its cleverness, so the tasks that maybe couldn't have been automated a few years ago, can be now. The Kiwi spotter has given us more time to create value for our license holders, and AI can do the same for you if you give it a chance.