AI use cases in South Africa
6 documented implementations
Absa Experiments with Microsoft Copilot to Boost Employee Efficiency
South African financial services group Absa experimented with Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Copilot for Sales across its corporate and investment banking, relationship banking, legal and marketing teams. Employees used Copilot to summarize financial statements and contracts, translate documents, summarize emails and build Excel analyses; the story quotes an Absa executive saying Copilot saves at least two hours per day for some users, and a marketing colleague saying reading and summarizing a set of PDF documents took 20 minutes.
Absa· South AfricaMicrosoft 365 Copilot · GitHub Copilot · Microsoft Copilot for Sales +1
Absa Group deploys Agentforce to double contact center productivity and speed debit order reversals 88%
Absa, South Africa's #2 bank serving 10 million customers across 15 African countries, deployed Salesforce Agentforce with Data 360 to replace a menu-driven chatbot with a conversational assistant that guides business banking customers through loan options, account questions and application forms. Absa expects the deployment to double the impact of its 5,000 contact center reps, cut debit order reversal handling from 30-45 minutes to under 5 minutes (an 88% speedup), and automate up to 50% of fraud-related service requests.
Absa Group· South AfricaAgentforce · Salesforce Data 360 · Financial Services Cloud +1
Discovery Bank combines ML and GenAI on Databricks to power a hyper-personalized next-best-action banking model
Discovery Bank built a next-best-action (NBA) framework on the Databricks Data + AI Platform, using Delta Lake, MLflow and Unity Catalog, that combines actuarial models, machine learning and generative AI to create a behavioral fingerprint for each client, driving segmentation, pricing, risk management and AI-generated communication templates for client servicing. The NBA model produced a 40% uplift in the impact of customer engagement activities, with data processing 20x faster and data product creation 5x faster than the bank's legacy environment.
Discovery Bank's Azure OpenAI assistant for agents delivers 500% ROI
Discovery Bank, a fully digital South African bank serving clients with transactional, lending, savings, investment, and forex products, built an AI-powered data infrastructure on Microsoft Azure and Azure Databricks. Using Azure OpenAI Service, the bank created an AI assistant for its roughly 200 customer service agents, who handle about 3,000 calls a day; the assistant surfaces personalized client and product information through a simple chat interface, helping agents proactively suggest tailored actions and reducing agent training time. Azure Databricks also powers predictive models that identify the most effective channels, messages, and timing for customer engagement. Combining the Databricks platform and the Azure OpenAI-powered assistant, Discovery Bank measured a 500% return on investment via its shared-value metric, alongside improvements in customer satisfaction, retention, and engagement.
Safari365 boosts internal efficiency 30% with Salesforce Agentforce AI agents
Safari365, a bespoke African safari travel company, deployed Salesforce Agentforce AI agents to automate low-value, repetitive tasks such as reconfirming supplier bookings and generating personalized 'day notes' for customer itineraries. The company started with internal-use agents built with human-in-the-loop oversight, iterating using the Agentforce Testing Center. Impact included a 30% increase in internal efficiency, quotes delivered in 30 minutes versus 2-3 manually generated per day previously, and a six-week time-to-value from signing to live deployment.
Capitec Bank scales conversational banking on WhatsApp with LivePerson
Capitec Bank, one of South Africa's largest retail banks, worked with LivePerson to bring banking services onto messaging platforms like WhatsApp, so clients did not need to delete banking apps to save phone storage. Capitec's client base grew from 16 million to 22 million, it handled 15 million client conversations in 2023 (7 million via WhatsApp), and it deployed LivePerson's Generative Insights and Agent Assist tools to help staff manage a larger volume of interactions, reporting 78% CSAT and 71% first contact resolution.
Capitec Bank· South AfricaWhatsApp · LivePerson Generative Insights · LivePerson Agent Assist