“We aim to build an artificial intelligence (AI) behemoth in South Africa and take the country and continent into the AI race and keep pace in this new world.”
So said University of Cape Town (UCT) graduate Lars Gumede. He set out to found 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-sized enterprises (SMEs). The idea behind it is that while top CEOs have an army of assistants, staff, experts, accountants, lawyers, consultants, etc., small business owners have only themselves. NowNow aims to use AI to empower small businesses and teams, and ultimately help small businesses become full-time AI Our goal is to enable employees to run their businesses on autopilot. The first version is now live. It combines local knowledge with the integration of useful real-world tools to act as an expert assistant for local business owners,” said Gumede.
Mr Gumede was born in Sweden, grew up in South Africa and studied actuarial science at UCT. He regularly writes about AI and cybersecurity for newspapers and think tanks, with a particular focus on how South Africa can capitalize on the AI revolution.
“AI offers breakthrough opportunities not just for countries but for entire continents.”
“Advances in AI have made it technically possible to do two things: embedding AI with locally relevant data so that it can accurately answer legal, tax and other questions; and connecting AI to tools (agents) that allow it to perform useful tasks in the real world as full-time employees. That’s what we’re building,” the 24-year-old said.
“AI adoption across countries and continents is still very low by global standards and levels of adoption, mainly centered around the use of chatbot tools and large-scale language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Grok. With the birth of these LLMs, much has become possible. NowNow is the next step in the AI chain: the application layer (which comes after the model layer) It’s about taking models and making them perform useful real-world tasks. This has the potential to completely transform the way 50 million small and medium-sized businesses operate on the continent.”
real source
Gumede further added, “In my opinion, applying AI to support small businesses is the best use of AI for this country’s economy and the entire continent, and is a great opportunity for start-ups like ours. Small businesses are the most important driving force of the economy. They are the biggest contributors to gross domestic product (GDP) and account for the lion’s share of job creation, yet they operate with the least support.”
Being careful about using AI is just one of the concerns people have. “One of the big challenges in the global field of AI is illusion: the illusion that AI will confidently give the wrong answer. This is a major concern if business owners are looking to use AI information to take action in the real world. To prevent this, they need to maintain a large knowledge base of local information and data that AI references. In this way, AI instead of just making up answers, we find and refer to actual, authentic sources,” Gumede said.
Currently, the first version of NowNow has over 1,000 users. They also signed a number of partners to grow the platform. The first version is very limited, but provides local expert knowledge and connectivity with some local tools. One such tool is Tender Finder. It uses AI to continuously search for tenders and public service opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses. The tool works to expand access to and transparency into public procurement systems, with the goal of eventually allowing AI to automate everything from opportunity discovery to bid submission and submission.
Gumede concluded: “AI offers an opportunity to leapfrog not just for countries, but for entire continents. Never before has informational and building power been so easily accessible. If we do not keep up with global AI developments, integrate them and reap their benefits, it could have a devastating impact on our nation’s prosperity and global standing. We are building to avoid that.”
