(Photo/Chinanews.com)

In a recent survey, 89.4 percent of respondents said they were optimistic about the application of AI technology in the next five years.

The survey was jointly launched by China Youth Daily and a leading Beijing-based AI firm. It covered 2,006 people, 3.5 percent of whom work in the AI industry.

The world’s first synthetic AI anchorwoman took to the screen during the ongoing annual sessions of China’s top political advisory body and top legislature, adding a new scenario for the application of AI technology.

Among all surveyed respondents, people are most familiar with automated driving, intelligent robots and smart home devices when it comes to AI, accounting for 53.7, 53.4, 44.8 percent respectively.

On top of these areas, smart medical treatment, intelligent devices and AI education are also familiar application scenarios.

Like water, electricity and other basic facilities, artificial intelligence is predicted to become commonplace in the future, said Megvii, China’s facial recognition technology company and also one of the survey's sponsors.

In the survey, 49.3 percent of respondents said the job role of waiter or waitress was most likely to be replaced by AI, followed by secretary (42.3 percent) and security (40.2 percent).

On the contrary, the occupation of journalist came in as the least replaceable in the survey.

Li Linzi, founder of Whalehouse Technology, a Shenzhen-based automated warehouse solution provider, said that AI technology had improved its warehouse space utilization by six times while reducing manual labor by 70 percent.

Guo Weimin, a spokesperson at the second session of the 13th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), said at a recent press conference that the CPPCC would further boost the integration of AI with the real economy, as well as lift the overall development of AI to a new level.