Just face it: facial recognition, as part of the wider artificial intelligence sector, has seen exponential growth over the past few years. And that's being mirrored in China's tech entrepreneurship sector.

At this store in Beijing's Haidian District, somebody's watching you. With new facial recognition technology, everything from payment to entertainment and yes, even shopping for groceries is about to become a lot more personalized.

Megvii, also known as Face++, the company that delivers Xiaomai's technology, has already built one of the world's biggest platforms for facial recognition technology. Its software development kits are used by developers and major companies including Alipay, Lenovo, and beauty app developer Meitu.

XIE YINAN, BRAND & MARKETS DIRECTOR FACE++ "We're pretty down to earth. Every product that we display solves specific problems for our customers. Now, in terms of the product and the demonstration, we're able to use data and real-world situations to provide the algorithm with feedback. This way it can improve and grow, just like a person."

Every industry from security to telecom, banking, and others are all seeing the potential of this new technology. Facial recognition will also have obvious uses in the security business, including in apartment complexes, shopping malls, and other areas. Sensetime has already secured major clients such as Union Pay, China Mobile, and Guangzhou police authorities.

YANG JING, FOUNDER & CEO AI ERA "To me, facial recognition is not just about B2B, and I think it will have much wider applications in the industry, both in terms of creating a 'brain' for an entire city, or smart traffic control systems. The precision and accuracy of this technology, combined with machine learning, will bring much higher efficiency and will increase the level of urban management. We will likely see much wider application of this technology."

China's facial recognition market is predicted to grow by up to 25% every year over the next five years, reaching around 800 million US dollars by 2021. According to CB Insights, 17 Chinese companies became unicorn companies in 2017.China is already leading the race in both R&D and application in this cutting edge technology.

XIE YINAN, BRAND & MARKETS DIRECTOR FACE++ "Today, facial recognition is simply about recognition, organic recognition, but in the future, we'll be talking about enhanced vision or virtual reality. We'll be talking about reconstruction. You can use a camera, or two cameras, to reconstruct the original face."

XU CHIHENG, CO-FOUNDER SENSETIME "If you look at driverless cars, if we can create an integrated solution using deep learning, machine vision, and even AI, they will perform much better than the average driver today. Once the machines are used extensively, they'll accumulate a lot of experience and data, which in turn will help them improve rapidly. And we're working to develop these new technologies into products that we can scale up and promote."