Chinese investors are scrambling to pour their money into artificial intelligence. But they also need to be careful and distinguish in the flood of business plans between the doubtful AI-enabled startups and those with real potential, experts in the field cautioned.

Investors, additionally, warned that startup entrepreneurs should concentrate on meeting a specific demand in a particular sector, rather than being unfocused and over-ambitious towards an industry.

Xu Jian, director of iLive Future Lab at Tsinghua SEM X-elerator, an incubator based in Beijing, is looking for opportunities in machine perception, including speech and facial recognition.