The Swedish company behind a Loebner-winning chatbot now runs more than 17,000 AI agents for the likes of Telefonica and Swisscom - and finds itself at a crossroads as cash-rich rivals like Uniphore reshape the market it helped invent.

A team of coders in Stavanger built conversational AI for the industries that fire you for getting it wrong. Ten years on, 600-plus AI agents handle 150 million conversations a year for banks, insurers and governments.