A new list of China's top 50 artificial intelligence companies indicates that the majority of them enjoy the backing of either the government or the country's incumbent tech giants. The China AI Top 50 Ranking was unveiled by China Money Network at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China on Wednesday. According to China Money Network founder Nina Xiang the report looked at more than 1,000 companies in the Chinese Ai sector and involved the participation of a broad range of industry experts. Companies were assessed on the basis of 12 items across five areas, including tech capability, maturity of products, fund-raising, business fundamentals and future potential. The report revealed that 27 out of the top 50 Chinese AI companies were backed by either government-associated funds or the leading tech giants of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.

Former Baidu fintech unit Du Xiaoman Financial says that artificial intelligence will lie at the core of upcoming fintech innovations. Speaking at the Baidu AI Developers Conference on 4 July,Du Xiaoman CEO Zhu Guang (朱光) said that finance was the most rapid channel for achieving commercialisation of AI technology. According to Zhu over the past two and half years Du Xiaoman has already applied AI technology to multiple areas including smart client canvassing, personal identification, big data risk control and smart investment and advisory. "We believe that the application of AI technology in the financial sphere has already left the laboratory phase, and officially entered the standardised application phase," said Zhu. In the area of risk control Duman is using online data in combination with central bank credit data, real-time data and conventional methods to greatly raise risk-control efficiency, while the company's facial recognition technology has achieved a success rate of over 98%, with a response time of just several dozen milliseconds.