Winners of AI Transformation Challenge 2026

AI is the biggest shift in software since the internet. To find the Nordic B2B software companies putting that into practice, and not just talking about it, Monterro ran the AI Transformation Challenge. On 20 August, in front of 1,500 software executives at the Nordic Software Summit, three of them were named the first AI Transformation Champions of the Year. 

They won out of a strong field of Nordic SaaS companies that have moved AI past pilots and into their day-to-day business:

AI for Business Operations: Kognity (Sweden). The education platform is replacing manual content authoring with orchestrated AI workflows, cutting the time to build a new subject from 18 months toward a single week, and the cost from SEK 3 million toward under SEK 10,000.

AI-Powered Product Transformation: Kaisa Technologies (Sweden). The customer engagement platform behind Europe’s leading automotive marketplaces launched AI voice products that answer the dealer calls sales reps can’t take, qualify the lead, and hand it back warm. AI deals already make up roughly a third of Kaisa’s signed business in 2026.

AI Coding for Software Development: Enable Banking (Finland). The open banking company put AI agents to work maintaining its integrations with more than 2,500 European banks, taking on repetitive fixes through GitLab issues and merge requests. That freed enough engineering capacity to reach profitability in 2025, even as the integration workload more than doubled.

The winners were chosen by an independent jury with deep experience in B2B software, scaling companies, and AI transformation:

• Nils Hulth, AI Lead at Monterro and Chair of the jury
• Ebba Heselius, AI Learning & Development Lead at AI Sweden
• Ather Gattami, PhD, AI expert and strategy advisor, founder and CEO of Bitynamics
• Nils Janse, Gen AI strategist and co-founder of Abundly AI
• Judge-y, an AI agent that reviewed submissions alongside the human judges

“These three show what AI transformation actually looks like. Not a demo, but a change in how the business runs,” says Nils Hulth, AI Lead at Monterro and Chair of the jury. “Each one took on its hardest bottleneck and rebuilt it around AI. That takes bold thinking and disciplined execution, and all three delivered.”
Each winner is named an AI Transformation Champion of the Year and earns an inspiration trip to Stanford University’s AI Labs.
“The Nordics have the talent and the discipline to lead this shift. These companies are proof,” says Gustav Lagercrantz, CEO of Monterro.

About AI Transformation Challenge: https://www.monterro.com/events/ai-transformation-challenge/