Linda Van Tilburg (00:00)
South African businesses operate in a maze of regulations ranging from SARS, labor laws and intellectual property to CIPC and the addendum system. So can AI help streamline any of this? Global AI tools trained on foreign data often get confused when asked about South Africa, but a South African-developed platform called NowNow is trying to fill that gap, and its founder, Lars Gumede, is with us in the studio. So how did this idea come to your mind?
Lars Gumede (00:33)
I've always had various ventures of my own, and I've been looking at how AI can help me in them. Eventually I realized that this was an amazing business opportunity in itself. Everyone asks the same question: How can AI help all types of business tasks? So we decided to develop a platform to help business owners use AI. Currently these are mainly very small businesses – owners who are usually on their own, with no employees or resources. As you can imagine, our most popular tools are things like calendar management. It's almost like having a personal assistant: You can ask the AI, “What do I have today?” or “Where is my meeting with Linda?” And of course Receipt Manager – if you own a restaurant or any business with a flood of receipts, you simply take a photo and the AI analyzes it for you. You can export the total or whatever you need for tax season. Right now it's really aimed at small business owners who want full staff support but obviously can't afford it. AI can provide that.
Linda Van Tilburg (02:02)
And how do you help them deal with labor laws and SARS regulations?
Lars Gumede (02:05)
We have what we call the real BusinessInbox platform. On the one hand, we train the AI on South African data so that it can be trusted for use in the real world. If you ask ChatGPT about anything related to the law or SARS, there is a risk of hallucination – it may very confidently give you a completely wrong answer. As a business owner you cannot afford to make real-world decisions based on bad information. So first, we ground AI in South African data. Second, we integrate it with real-world tools: we connect it to your emails, receipts, calendars, tenders, etc., so that AI can actually perform real-world tasks for you, just as an employee would.
Linda Van Tilburg (02:58)
Well, just list all the services you provide to businesses.
Lars Gumede (03:02)
In the chat, it has been trained on SARS, CIPC, labor laws and all kinds of South African data. Tools include email summaries – you connect AI to your emails – calendar, tender finder, invoice manager, receipt manager, compliance center and more. We also have a news page that gives local news summaries and social media trends summaries. The point is that a top CEO will have an army of experts, staff and assistants. We're trying to use AI to give a small business owner all that.
Linda Van Tilburg (03:39)
You mentioned tenders. So how can you get information about them?
Lars Gumede (03:42)
We connect our AI with government portals. Instead of having to navigate a lot of difficult and not-so-good government websites, you can type into the AI: “Please find me tenders related to roads in the Eastern Cape,” and it will give you a list.
Linda Van Tilburg (04:05)
Will your platform also help tackle the problem of corruption and fraud in procurement with tenders in South Africa?
Lars Gumede (04:14)
Absolutely. The biggest source of tender corruption is often that people do not know which tenders are out there. You end up with one person bidding – almost like a nobid contract. If we can get these tenders in front of more people, obviously more people will apply, and hopefully the government – and ultimately the taxpayer – will get a much better deal. The second thing is that AI – not necessarily ours, but AI in general – can be used on the other side, so that the government can monitor the entire procurement process. So there are opportunities on both sides: certainly we are seeing more companies putting out tenders, and the government is also likely to use AI to monitor everything.
Linda Van Tilburg (05:09)
Have you provided your services to the Government?
Lars Gumede (05:19)
We have, and it's going slowly. Hopefully we will make progress. As I say, this is a huge opportunity, and it has been done very successfully in countries around the world. Hopefully we can have some sort of system in place at high levels in the Treasury to monitor the entire procurement process 24/7 using AI.
Linda Van Tilburg (05:37)
It's interesting that you say this is happening slowly with the government. When you approach them and say, “Listen, I can make this system much clearer, not so opaque as it is right now,” what is their answer?
Lars Gumede (05:50)
You would hope that they would take advantage of this opportunity, because this is an amazing chance to use AI to root out corruption. But most of the time you keep getting transferred from one underling to another, and nothing goes anywhere. Hopefully this will change. We are still connected with all types of departments.
Linda Van Tilburg (06:16) Where in other countries has it been used?
Lars Gumede (06:19)
A perfect example of this is Brazil. Their procurement system is similar to that of South Africa – they spend approximately the same proportion of GDP on procurement and issue about five hundred calls a day for tender across departments. Manually, it would be impossible to monitor all those contracts. So the Comptroller General of their union developed an AI system that monitors the entire procurement process. It checks beforehand: Is it a legitimate company? Who are the directors? Was it installed yesterday? It looks at blacklists, performance history and keeps track of contracts live: Is the person performing? Are they getting the job done? From 2023 onwards, contracts worth the equivalent of more than five billion rand have been cancelled. The system monitors over a million contracts per year. This is an amazing use case, and obviously South Africa needs it. It is not just the corruption aspect – although this is huge for South Africa. Countries around the world are using AI in every way. In Sweden, where I was born, the company registration office implemented an AI that sorts all incoming emails. He used to have five to ten dedicated employees handling it; Now AI reads them, sorts them, replies or sends them to the concerned department. It was so successful that the department now has its own AI hub working on other issues. In Singapore they have taken initiatives to train their population in AI literacy, especially given the cybersecurity threats posed by deepfakes and scams. There are almost limitless possibilities for governments to use AI to better their countries, and I think South Africa definitely needs to do it to its fullest.
Linda Van Tilburg (08:52)
So how long has your app been running, and what's adoption been like?
Lars Gumede (08:56)
We went live in November and we were completely broke – no outside money. Yet now we have one thousand two hundred signups and over three hundred active users. We are in the process of raising appropriate funding to scale the business and take it to the next level.
Linda Van Tilburg (09:16)
How much are you planning to raise?
Lars Gumede (09:18)
Of course, people are raising billions of dollars in the world of AI. We are trying to raise at least twenty million rand, and if we can do more, we can do even more. There are truly massive benefits and opportunities across the continent.
Linda Van Tilburg (09:41)
How safe is it in terms of cyber security?
Lars Gumede (09:43)
We use standard encryption protocols – everything you'd expect. Right now it's a website that you log into. With the funding we want to create a mobile app, which will be very easy and secure. Everything is hosted in the country. We try to keep our database as small as possible – if someone is constantly asking about their email, you don't want their entire inbox sitting around waiting to be hacked. We keep only what is necessary to provide a good experience.
Linda Van Tilburg (10:32)
What features are you planning to add next?
Lars Gumede (10:37)
We want to take all our existing features further. It should be able to respond to emails, rather than just email summaries. Not just a tender finder – it should be able to apply for tenders. Not only monitor your calendar – but also interact with it. We're going to improve all the existing tools so that the platform really behaves as if you have a full-time team of regular employees.
Linda Van Tilburg (11:11)
How widespread is the adoption of AI in South Africa at this time?
Lars Gumede (11:15)
South Africa is a unique case. A certain part of the population is very connected to global trends and adopts these services almost instantly. Yet a large portion has been seriously left behind. At a high level, top companies and individuals are using AI fully or close to it. But a large portion of the population is not using these devices, and they can help the lives of regular people in every way. In government, adoption is essentially nowhere compared to global trends. Top countries are using AI in government to enhance operations and efficiency in every way.
Linda Van Tilburg (12:21)
In which other government departments do you think AI can be used?
Lars Gumede (12:24)
Every state owned enterprise. The cool thing about AI is that you can give each employee their own personal assistant to supercharge whatever they're doing. Take Eskom: someone working at a power station refers to manuals or company databases a lot, communicating with other departments. With AI connected to the entire system, they don't have to waste time reading manuals, searching databases, wondering what to do, or waiting for responses. AI manages all this and supercharges the entire government. It can be used in thousands of ways. Eskom alone suffers approximately one billion cyber attacks every month, mainly denial of service. AI is a huge opportunity there: instead of manually responding to every attack without constantly learning, AI can automatically prevent them and bring attacks closer to zero, because the same patterns no longer work.
Linda Van Tilburg (14:24)
Can this be politically charged to the South African government because they think people may lose their jobs?
Lars Gumede (14:31)
The question on a global scale is this: Will AI take over everyone's jobs? We don't know for sure, but apparently some jobs can be done by AI, so they can go. On the other hand, AI will create all kinds of new industries, as the Internet and personal computer revolutions did – potentially creating more jobs than will be lost. Furthermore, AI has long been able to automate many tasks, yet people are still doing it. Just because there is growth does not mean that jobs disappear. It is quite possible – indeed probable – that some jobs that could be automated will not be, as resources are better spent on new challenges. Therefore tasks that can technically be automated can be performed by humans.