Artificial Solutions is a multinational technology company and provider of conversational AI, trusted by some of the largest organisations in the world. The company’s CEO, Per Ottosson, tells us more about conversational AI and his company’s vision of a world without queues.
Please tell us a bit about your business.
Artificial Solutions began by building chatbots back in the early 2000s, including IKEA’s Ask Anna, one of the first to be known across the globe. Since then, the company has patented the technologies fundamental to the evolution of the conversational AI industry. By making conversations a part of every software developer’s toolkit, we’re enabling innovators across every industry to reinvent how companies engage with their customers.
Handling 86 languages, and covering 40% of the world’s population, our platform, Teneo – from the Latin ‘to understand’ – is an advanced Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for building Virtual Assistants, which enables companies to communicate with their internal and external customers in any way they want; they can talk or write like they would to a human, and the technology makes machines understand and act.
Developed over 20 years, our proprietary technology operates as part of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and provides an extensive set of tools and features for the development of conversational AI. Seamlessly integrated with the channels and platforms that operate within an organisation’s contact centre, it means companies will never miss another customer, no matter where in the world they are or which channel they prefer.
How has the business grown since it started and how did you ensure growth?
The company has grown in three distinct generations. In the first two, customers bought a solution from us, along with a licence and accompanying professional services. It’s in the third, and current iteration, that we began to offer our SaaS platform.
The move to SaaS came from our realisation that we could offer our customers an even better experience than they already had. We knew that by building an attractive SaaS offering, we’d be able to drive more business value. It would free up our customers’ time, for example, and reduce their costs on system administration, while allowing us to ship more features faster than before, thereby making them more productive.
Teneo went live in 2021 and has grown at a strong rate since then. We’re able to attract new clients and migrate existing ones at an unprecedented pace. What’s more, we’ve seen a 320% growth in revenue as customers increase their usage of the platform, adding more use cases, channels and languages.
Today, we power millions of interactions across a vast set of industries each month. And this hasn’t gone unrecognised. The world’s largest software companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and IBM have all made forward citations of our pioneering patents, confirming our position as a leading innovator in the conversational AI space.
What types of clients and markets do you serve?
We operate in what’s widely known as the ‘virtual assistants’ market. Our platform is best suited to organisations in Europe and the US – typically retailers, telcos, Internet native companies and, increasingly, healthcare providers – that have many interactions with customers or patients.
Many of these customers are suffering from app fatigue and they’ll avoid pressing one for service, two to speak to an operator, and so on. Businesses therefore need to provide an alternative. But that alternative can’t be humans answering phone calls, chats or messages; interactions come in waves and this would mean having to staff call centres with a large number of people.
Teneo is at the forefront of telecom provider, Swisscom’s contact centre, for example, where its conversational AI voice solutions and chatbots support more than nine million calls each year in four languages. Elsewhere, automobile manufacturer, Škoda Auto, deployed a conversational AI solution to transform the experience of its online visitors, rapidly increasing the volume of test drive bookings and greatly improving its customer service.
What’s the business’s approach to management?
We lead with three simple management principles. The first of these is that we all work towards an overall goal. The second is that we all have clarity in our own roles in achieving this goal. And the third is that we work to ensure we always communicate with clarity and authenticity within the organisation.
What is that goal? And what is your company’s vision?
Artificial Solution’s goal is to see a world without queues and keypad navigation; a world of instant service. The first step in reaching this goal will be measured as achieving one billion API calls in our platform in 2024.
Our vision is one where we remove the barriers that exist between customers and their desired service, by connecting humans and machines. We want our customers to build faster, bigger and better automation with us. After all, life is too short to wait for service.
What has your career looked like so far?
Although I hold a Business MBA, I’ve spent my whole career in tech. I’ve built companies, including a company I founded in the late 90s, which created Internet infrastructure, and I’ve worked in companies where either growth or a reset was needed.
Before returning to my native Sweden to lead Artificial Solutions in 2020, I was largely based in the US where I gained more than 30 years of senior management experience, including a decade working in conversational AI solutions.
How do you equip your staff with skills and knowledge?
Our most important asset is our technology. As 75% of our staff are engineers, our most important knowledge is therefore the knowledge that’s shared within the organisation. We want to be transparent, though, and share this with our customers too. So, we use the same documentation site for both internal and external purposes, often using mini webinars to highlight news on the site or using updates on the team chat channel to encourage people to visit the site to learn more. Then there’s the information we have on our customers. Here, we use an internal site to keep the organisation up to date on what customers like and need.
Staff are offered additional skills such as languages, new technologies and leadership training as part of their annual development plans. And we’re proud to support increased diversity across the company. Our AiAllies initiative, for example, promotes the stories and insights of industry-leading women and, as we continue to grow as a business, we promise to continue to push for diversity at all levels, across all departments and functions, by valuing equity, diversity and integrity. Indeed, while I’m proud that Artificial Solutions has achieved a ratio of 38% of women in managerial positions, our target stands at achieving a 50/50 ratio at the earliest opportunity.
How do you work with other executives within the C-suite to make sure your voice is heard?
I believe in leadership from the trenches, so I try to involve myself in everything from tech development, customer acquisition and customer retention to HR and finance. That way I can make sure the company is moving in the right direction. Being part of the tasks these teams are driving is the best way to show commitment to the business and help steer its success.