Book excerpt: This book constitutes the proceedings of the 31st Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2018, held in Wellington, New Zealand, in December 2018. The 50 full and 26 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The paper were organized in topical sections named: agents, games and robotics; AI applications and innovations; computer vision; constraints and search; evolutionary computation; knowledge representation and reasoning; machine learning and data mining; planning and scheduling; and text mining and NLP.