AI implementation advisory in South Africa.
By the time most companies call us, they’ve already decided they want AI. The board has read the same articles you have. What they don’t have yet is the thing itself: software that’s actually built, wired into how the business runs, and quietly doing the work every day. Deciding to use AI is the easy part. Making it real is where we come in.
We build it, not just advise on it
A lot of firms will sell you a strategy, hand over a slide deck and wish you luck with the hard part. We work the other way round. We’re glad to help you figure out where AI belongs and what it’s worth, but the reason clients keep us around is that we then go and build the thing and get it running in production.
There’s no handoff between the people who pitch and the people who deliver, because they’re the same people: a founder who has run companies, an advisor who has sat on the other side of big deals, and an engineering team that ships AI for a living. You talk to the people doing the work.
What we actually build
Less of the flashy demo, more of the unglamorous stuff that quietly takes hours out of someone’s week. In practice that’s agentic workflows that carry a task from start to finish, internal copilots trained on your own data and tools, automation for the repetitive work nobody enjoys, and the reporting underneath it all that makes any of it worth trusting. When it’s something your customers actually touch, whether a booking flow, a storefront or a members’ portal, we build that too, with the AI sitting quietly inside it.
What it’s like to work with us
We don’t run things from a distance. We sit inside your systems and next to your team, ship in pieces you can see and use rather than disappearing for three months, and build everything so your own people can run it the day we leave. The point is to hand you something that keeps working, not a dependency on us.
Because most of this touches real customer and company data, we build with POPIA in mind from the first day, keeping sensitive information where you can control it, and picking the models and hosting that suit your rules rather than ours.
Three ways we work together
Most people who come to us for AI work start in the first column.
| Advisory | Build & embed | Venture | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best when | You need strategy and a working AI capability, end to end | You have the direction and need a senior team to ship it | We co-own and operate a business together |
| What we do | Scope, build, integrate, hand over | Embed product & engineering for the build | Equity, operating role, engineering inside the company |
| Who owns it after | Your team | Your team | Shared, we stay in |
| Commercials | Scoped to the engagement | Scoped to the build | Equity + operating involvement |
Who we’ve done this for
Our work runs across South African grocery retail and the wine trade, alongside the ventures we own and operate ourselves. What we actually did varies a lot: a business-continuity programme here, an executive seat there, a platform built end to end somewhere else. So we’ve spelled out each one rather than lumping them together.
Questions we get asked
Do you build the AI, or just advise on it?
We build it. The advice matters, but we’re not a strategy shop that hands you a deck and leaves. Our own engineers build the system, plug it into your tools, and stay until it’s actually running.
What’s the difference between AI strategy and AI implementation?
Strategy is deciding where AI is worth using. Implementation is the harder, slower half: building it, wiring it into your data and tools, and getting it stable enough to run every day. Plenty of businesses have the strategy and get stuck right here, and that gap is most of what we do.
How does a project usually start?
Usually with a conversation about where the real time and risk is going in your business, not with a tool. From there we pick something worth doing, build it, get it live, and hand it over so your team can run it. Small and working beats big and theoretical.
What happens to our data, and is this POPIA-friendly?
We treat it as a first concern, not an afterthought. Sensitive data stays under your control, and we choose the models, data flows and hosting that fit your governance and South Africa’s POPIA rules.
Where are you based?
We work across South Africa and internationally. The firm was started in 2024 by Chris Lombard and Nicolò Pudel.