In line with a rocky and uncertain economic climate, the pace of investments flowing into the red-hot artificial intelligence technology space has cooled somewhat this past year. Things are still red hot, however, and AI is seeing a lot of progress, mitigated by concerns over safety and responsibility. Interestingly, much of its development has moved out of labs and into commercial ventures. These are the conclusions drawn by two leading venture capitalists in the tech space, Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital and Ian Hogarth of Plural, outlined in their annual summary of the state of AI. The report covers all facets of AI, from developments with DeepMind to NVIDIA's rapidly expanding processing capabilities.

This is the age of Artificial Intelligence. The technology is fast becoming ubiquitous, being employed everywhere from driverless vehicles to making suggestions to online shoppers what they should buy next, to facial recognition software to trawling research for hidden knowledge. The benefits of AI are already impacting people's lives in more ways than it was ever imagined. It is estimated that one of 10 enterprises are already using more than 10 AI applications to efficiently solve complex real-world problems. Within the emerging technology space -- AI, robotics, cybersecurity, blockchain, internet of things (IoT), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) -- AI startups and scaleups have seen "hockey stick-style growth since 2016."