Linda van Tilburg (00:00)
South African businesses operate in a maze of regulations, from SARS, labour laws and intellectual property to the CIPC and the addenda system. So can AI help streamline any of that? Global AI tools trained on foreign data often hallucinate 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 you come up with this idea?
Lars Gumede (00:33)
I’ve always had various ventures of my own, and I kept looking at how AI could help me with them. Eventually I realised that was itself an amazing business opportunity. Everyone asks the same question: how can AI help with all sorts of business tasks? So we decided to develop a platform to help business owners utilise AI. Currently it’s mainly very small businesses — owners who are generally on their own, without staff or resources. Our most popular tools, as you’d imagine, 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 the receipts manager — if you’re a restaurant owner or any business with a flood of receipts, you just take a picture and the AI analyses it for you. For tax season you can export totals or whatever you need. Right now it’s really aimed at the small business owner who wants the support of a whole staff but obviously cannot afford it. AI can provide that.
Linda van Tilburg (02:02)
And how do you help them navigate labour laws and SARS rules?
Lars Gumede (02:05)
We have what we call a real businessinabox platform. On one hand, we train the AI on South African data so it can be relied upon for realworld uses. If you ask ChatGPT about something to do with the law or SARS, there’s a danger of hallucination — it may give you a completely wrong answer very confidently. As a business owner you can’t afford to take realworld decisions based on bad information. So first, we ground the AI in South African data. Second, we integrate it with realworld tools: we connect it to your email, receipts, calendar, tenders and so on, so the AI can actually perform realworld tasks for you, as an employee would.
Linda van Tilburg (02:58)
Well, just list all the services you offer to businesses.
Lars Gumede (03:02)
In the chat, it’s trained on SARS, CIPC, labour laws and all sorts of South African data. The tools include email summaries — you connect the AI to your email — calendar, tender finder, invoice manager, receipts manager, compliance centre and more. We also have a news page that gives local news summaries and social media trend summaries. The point is that a top CEO would have armies of experts, staff and assistants. We’re trying to use AI to give all of that to a small business owner.
Linda van Tilburg (03:39)
You mentioned tenders. So how can you get information about them?
Lars Gumede (03:42)
We connect our AI to the government portals. Instead of having to navigate the very difficult and not very good government websites, you can just 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 to combat the problem in South Africa of corruption and fraud in procurement with tenders?
Lars Gumede (04:14)
Absolutely. The biggest source of tender corruption is often that people don’t even 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, then obviously more apply, and hopefully the government — and ultimately the taxpayer — gets a much better deal. The second thing is that AI — not necessarily ours, but AI in general — could be used on the other side, for the government to monitor the whole procurement process. So there’s opportunity on both sides: certainly with us putting tenders in front of more companies, and the possibility of AI being used on the government side to monitor everything as well.
Linda van Tilburg (05:09)
Have you offered your services to the government?
Lars Gumede (05:19)
We have, and it’s going slowly. Hopefully we’ll make inroads. As I say, it’s a huge opportunity, and it’s been done very successfully in countries around the world. Hopefully we can have some sort of system at a high level in Treasury monitoring the whole procurement process 24/7 using AI.
Linda van Tilburg (05:37)
It’s interesting that you say it’s going slowly with the government. What is their answer when you contact them and say, “Listen, I can make this system very clear, not so opaque as it is at the moment”?
Lars Gumede (05:50)
You would hope they would jump at the opportunity, because this is an amazing chance to use AI to clear up corruption. But most of the time you end up being passed from underling to underling, and nothing goes anywhere. Hopefully that will change. We’re still engaging with all sorts of departments.
Linda van Tilburg (06:16) Where has it been used in other countries?
Lars Gumede (06:19)
One perfect example is Brazil. Their procurement system is quite similar to South Africa’s — they spend roughly the same proportion of GDP on procurement and release about five hundred calls for tender a day across departments. Manually, it would be impossible to monitor all those contracts. So their Comptroller General of the Union developed an AI system that monitors the entire procurement process. It does checks beforehand: is this a proper company? Who are the directors? Was it set up yesterday? It looks at blacklists, history of performance, and livemonitors the contracts: is the person performing? Are they getting the job done? Since 2023, contracts worth the equivalent of over five billion rand have been cancelled. The system monitors over one hundred thousand contracts a year. That’s an amazing use case, and obviously something South Africa needs. It’s not just the corruption aspect — though for South Africa that is huge. Around the world, countries are using AI in all sorts of ways. In Sweden, where I was born, the Companies Registration Office implemented an AI that sorts all incoming emails. They used to have five to ten dedicated employees handling it; now the AI reads them, sorts them, provides answers or forwards them to the relevant department. It’s been so successful that the department now has its own AI hub working on other issues. In Singapore they have an initiative to train their population in AI literacy, especially with cybersecurity threats from deepfakes and scams. There’s almost unlimited potential for governments using AI to better their countries, and I think South Africa definitely needs to do that to the fullest.
Linda van Tilburg (08:52)
So how long has your app been going, and what is the adoption like?
Lars Gumede (08:56)
We went live in November and we’ve been completely bootstrapped — no outside money. Yet we now have one thousand two hundred signups and over three hundred active users. We’re in the process of raising a proper funding round to scale up 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)
In the world of AI, people are raising billions, of course. We’re looking to raise at least twenty million rand, and if we can do more, then we can do more. The upside and potential are there to really scale across the whole continent.
Linda van Tilburg (09:41)
How secure is it in terms of cybersecurity?
Lars Gumede (09:43)
We use standard encryption protocols — everything you would expect. Right now it’s a website you log into. With funding, we want to build a mobile app, which will be much easier and more secure. Everything is hosted incountry. We try to keep as little as possible in our database — if someone is constantly asking about their email, you don’t want their whole inbox sitting there waiting to be hacked. We only keep what’s needed to offer 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. Instead of just email summaries, it should be able to reply to emails. Not just a tender finder — it should be able to apply for tenders. Not just monitor your calendar — it should interact with it. We’re going to enhance all the existing tools so the platform really behaves as if you have a fulltime team of regular employees.
Linda van Tilburg (11:11)
How widespread is the adoption of AI in South Africa at the moment?
Lars Gumede (11:15)
South Africa is a unique case. A certain proportion of the population is very connected to global trends and adopts these services almost immediately. Yet there’s a huge swathe lagging seriously behind. At the higher end, top companies and individuals are utilising AI to the fullest, or close to it. But a huge proportion of the population isn’t using these tools, and they can help regular people’s lives in all sorts of ways. In government, adoption is essentially nowhere compared with global trends. The top countries have been using AI in government to supercharge operations and efficiency in all sorts of ways.
Linda van Tilburg (12:21)
In which other government departments do you think AI could be used?
Lars Gumede (12:24)
Every stateowned enterprise. The lovely thing about AI is you can give every employee their own personal assistant to supercharge whatever they’re doing. Take Eskom: someone working at a power station refers a lot to manuals or company databases, communicates with other departments. With AI connected to the whole system, they don’t have to spend time reading manuals, searching databases, wondering what to do, or waiting for responses. AI manages it all and supercharges the whole of government. It can be used in thousands of ways. Eskom alone receives almost a billion cyber attacks every month, mainly denialofservice. AI is a huge opportunity there: instead of manually responding to every attack without constant learning, AI can automate deterring them and bring attacks close to zero, because similar patterns no longer work.
Linda van Tilburg (14:24)
Could it be politically charged for the South African government because they think people might lose their jobs?
Lars Gumede (14:31)
That’s the question globally: is AI going to take everybody’s jobs? We don’t know for sure, but obviously some jobs can be done by AI, so those may go. On the other hand, AI will create all sorts of new industries, just as the internet and personal computer revolutions did — likely creating more jobs than are lost. Also, AI has long been able to automate many jobs, yet people are still doing them. Just because developments happen doesn’t mean those jobs disappear. It’s quite possible — in fact probable — that some jobs that could be automated won’t be, because the resources are better spent on new challenges. So jobs that could technically be automated may remain done by humans.
Source: https://www.biznews.com/good-hope-project/local-ai-businessinabox-startup-nownow
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