It takes a lot to stand out in a market increasingly crowded with artificial intelligence start-ups promising all kinds of business reshaping products, but in just a year Apate.ai has signed up two of Australia’s biggest companies, and built a product that would resonate with anyone.

The Sydney-based start-up was originally spun out of Macquarie University and has turned the power of AI into building a growing bot army that work as part of a system using advanced conversational abilities to spend hours chatting to scammers, who think they are human victims.