"We aim to build a South African artificial intelligence (AI) giant that can put the country and continent into the AI race and ensure we do not fall behind in this new world."
So said University of Cape Town (UCT) alumnus Lars Gumede, who set out to create NowNow, which operates under Axel Technologies - an applied AI startup that streamlines tedious business tasks.
"NowNow is essentially a business-in-a-box for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The idea behind it is that top CEOs have armies of assistants, staff, experts, accountants, lawyers, consultants, etc but a small business owner only has themselves. NowNow aims to use AI to give SMEs the power of large companies and teams, with the goal that eventually an SME can have full-time AI employees and a business that runs on autopilot. Currently, we have a first version live that pairs local knowledge with useful real-world tool integrations to act as an expert assistant for local business owners" said Gumede.
Gumede - who was born in Sweden and grew up in South Africa - studied actuarial science at UCT. He regularly writes on AI and cybersecurity for newspapers and think-tanks, focusing especially on how South Africa can leverage the AI revolution.
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"AI offers a leapfrogging opportunity for not just the country, but the whole continent."
"Advances in AI make it technically possible to do two things: ground AI in locally relevant data to allow it to give accurate answers to legal, tax and other questions, as well as connect AI to tools (agentic) to allow it to do useful tasks in the real world, acting as full-time employees. That is what we are building," the 24-year-old said.
"AI adoption across the country and continent is still very low by global standards and the extent to which there is adoption, it is primarily the use of chatbot tools and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Grok. With the birth of these LLMs, much is made possible. NowNow represents the next stage in the AI chain: the application layer (which comes after the model layer), which is concerned with taking models and making them do useful real-world tasks. This has the potential to completely revolutionise how the continent's 50 million SMEs operate."
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Gumede added: "Applying AI to support SMEs is, in my view, the best possible usage of AI for the country's economy and the continent in general, and it is an amazing opportunity for a startup like ours. SMEs are the most important driver of the economy. They are the largest contributor to the gross domestic product (GDP) and account for the majority of job creation, yet they operate with the least support."
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Exercising due care in the use of AI is just one of the reservations people have. "One major challenge in the global field of AI is hallucinations - AI confidently giving false answers. This is a big concern if business owners are going to use the information of AI to take action in the real world. To prevent this is to maintain a large knowledge base of local information and data for the AI to refer to. This way, the AI does not simply make up an answer but finds and refers to the actual true source," said Gumede.
Currently, NowNow's first version has over a thousand users. They have also signed up many partners to grow the platform. The first version is very limited but does provide local expert knowledge and connection with a few local tools. One such tool is the Tender Finder, which uses AI to continuously search for tender and public service opportunities for SMEs. This tool works to broaden access to, and transparency of, the public procurement system, with the goal that eventually AI does everything from finding opportunities to applying and submitting bids automatically.
Gumede concluded: "AI offers a leapfrogging opportunity for not just the country, but the whole continent. Never before has such informational and building power been so easily accessed. If we do not keep up with global AI developments and integrate them to collect their benefits, there may be devastating effects for the country's prosperity and its global standing. We are building in order to avoid that."
