Artificial Intelligence is increasingly shaping the way businesses engage with customers. While many enterprise AI platforms are developed in Silicon Valley or Europe, one South African company is proving that world-class AI can be built right here on the continent. AllSight AI, developed in Johannesburg, is already supporting major South African brands with multilingual, omnichannel customer engagement solutions designed for African businesses. Joining CNBC Africa is Thato Molaba, Founder & CEO, Allsight AI.
Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:45:53 GMT
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AI Generated Summary
Key Points:
- Allsight AI is a Johannesburg-developed company building AI customer engagement tools for African businesses.
- The startup focuses on multilingual support across South Africa’s languages, addressing a major gap in imported AI systems.
- Its early traction has come in the automotive sector, where it helps businesses capture, qualify and route leads.
- Customers are increasingly using chat platforms such as WhatsApp to research and buy vehicles instead of making phone calls.
- Molaba said the company’s AI is agentic rather than templated, allowing more natural and customized interactions.
- The company says client data remains owned by clients, with local cloud infrastructure supporting security and compliance.
- Molaba argues AI should be viewed as a productivity tool that empowers staff rather than simply replacing workers.
- A shortage of AI skills and curriculum gaps remain a challenge for scaling the sector in South Africa and across Africa.
- Molaba says Africa needs more investment in data centers, AI infrastructure and training to avoid dependence on Western systems.
- Allsight AI plans to expand beyond automotive through its parent company, Stems Corp, which is developing AI tools for corporates and government.
Topics
AISouth AfricaAllsight AIThato Molabaenterprise AIcustomer engagementautomotive industryWhatsApp commercemultilingual AIAfrican technology
A Johannesburg-founded artificial intelligence company is making the case that Africa can build its own enterprise-grade AI tools tailored to local languages, customer behavior and business realities, as demand grows for more personalized and always-on digital engagement.
Speaking in a television interview, Thato Molaba, founder and CEO of Allsight AI, said the company has been developing multilingual, omnichannel customer engagement solutions designed specifically for African businesses, with an early focus on South Africa’s motor industry.
The company’s pitch comes at a time when many enterprise AI platforms used by African firms are still built in Silicon Valley or Europe, often requiring local businesses to adapt foreign systems to African use cases. Molaba said that mismatch creates a major opportunity for locally developed AI, especially in a country where language diversity and different patterns of communication shape how consumers interact with brands.
“One of the biggest challenges for companies is that many clients may not speak English as a first language,” Molaba said. “Having a support channel that can connect social media platforms and communication channels, while allowing people to engage in Afrikaans, Zulu and South Africa’s other languages, is very beneficial.”
That local fluency is central to Allsight AI’s strategy. Rather than relying on rigid scripts, Molaba said the company’s systems are designed to sound natural and familiar, with adjustable tone, pacing and vocabulary that can be customized for a brand or use case. The aim, he said, is to create AI interactions that feel authentic enough that users may not immediately realize they are speaking to a machine.
In practical terms, Allsight AI has built its early traction around a clear business pain point: lead management in the automotive sector. Car dealerships and motor brands routinely deal with missed calls, delayed responses and large volumes of low-quality inquiries. Molaba said the company’s AI tools help address that by capturing, qualifying and routing customer leads in real time.
The platform allows customers to move away from traditional call-based inquiries and engage through chat, particularly WhatsApp, at any time of day. Consumers can ask about vehicle servicing, parts, new or pre-owned cars and receive continuous support without waiting for office hours or live agents.
According to Molaba, that shift reflects a broader behavioral change among buyers. Customers are increasingly comfortable researching and even configuring vehicles through messaging platforms, where they can pause and resume conversations more easily than on a phone call.
“People are buying cars through WhatsApp,” he said. “If you’re at work and on your break, you can talk to the AI, get the options you want, get more information on the product, and then continue the conversation later.”
For businesses, the value proposition is not only convenience but also improved conversion. Molaba said AI can help filter out so-called dead leads — including accidental or non-serious inquiries — and identify prospects with genuine purchase intent before passing them into the client’s systems.
That could offer a measurable efficiency boost for sectors where response times and lead quality directly affect sales performance. While Molaba referenced work with major automotive players, the broader implication is that AI-led customer engagement may increasingly become part of frontline commerce rather than a back-office experiment.
Data ownership and privacy remain central concerns in any AI deployment, particularly in regulated industries. On that point, Molaba said client data remains owned by the client, while Allsight AI manages and segments information as required. He added that local hosting and cloud security infrastructure are key, pointing to Amazon Web Services’ presence in South Africa as an advantage for compliance and systems security.
“Data is key, data is power, data is currency now,” he said.
Molaba also pushed back on the idea that AI is simply a job-destroying technology. Instead, he described it as a productivity tool that helps employees work faster and more effectively, especially in large organizations where staff are often stretched across multiple responsibilities.
His argument echoes a broader debate now underway across corporate South Africa and beyond: whether AI will replace jobs outright, or whether it will augment existing workers and enable businesses to scale. In Molaba’s view, AI is being used to support staff, not eliminate them.
“AI is a tool that we use to empower already their staff,” he said. “It’s a productivity tool so it can accelerate your productivity.”
Even so, Molaba acknowledged one of the biggest constraints on growth in the sector is the shortage of AI skills. He said educational curricula have not kept pace with the speed of adoption, and that businesses still struggle to find people with practical experience in the underlying technical disciplines, from Python programming to AI agents and retrieval-augmented systems.
That skills gap, he suggested, is part of a wider structural challenge. Africa, he said, still relies heavily on westernized AI systems that are not built with local languages and contexts in mind. In many cases, companies must fine-tune international tools or connect them to external APIs just to approximate African language support, often with uneven results.
For that reason, Molaba argued that the continent should invest more aggressively in data centers, AI infrastructure and education if it wants to build durable competitive capacity rather than remain a consumer of imported intelligence systems.
Looking ahead, Molaba said Allsight AI is aiming beyond automotive customer engagement. He said the company sits under a broader holding structure, Stems Corp, which is developing AI productivity tools for governments, corporates and a wider range of institutions.
While still early in its growth journey, Allsight AI’s emergence underscores a larger theme taking shape across African technology markets: that the next wave of AI adoption may depend not just on access to global models, but on who can localize them effectively for underserved languages, markets and industries.
If that thesis holds, South African startups like Allsight AI could play a critical role in defining what enterprise AI looks like on the continent — and proving that world-class systems need not be imported to be effective.
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