This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI 2016, held in Hobart, TAS, Australia, in December 2016. The 40 full papers and 18 short papers presented together with 8 invited short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 121 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents and multiagent systems; AI applications and innovations; big data; constraint satisfaction, search and optimisation; knowledge representation and reasoning; machine learning and data mining; social intelligence; and text mining and NLP. The proceedings also contains 2 contributions of the AI 2016 doctoral consortium and 6 contributions of the SMA 2016.