As Managing Director of Existor Ltd, Carpenter is developing AI for entertainment, companionship and communication and education. His AI entries George and Joan were #1 for Loebner Prize (2005) and (2006). In 2010, Carpenter won the British Computer Society's Machine Intelligence Competition.

In 2011, Cleverbot, a learning Artificial Intelligence conversationalist, took part alongside humans in a formal Turing Test at the Techniche 2011 festival at IIT Guwahati, India on 3 September. The results from 1,334 votes were announced 4 September 2011. Cleverbot was judged to be 59.3% human, far exceeding expectations. The humans in the event achieved just 63.3%.