After the Bell: The Prosus of becoming involved in AI

During the results presentation of Prosus/Naspers on Tuesday, CEO Bob van Dijk waxed lyrical about AI, as so many tech CEOs have recently. For many people, Generative AI is a kind of science fiction, which verges on the creepy. For scholars, it’s a quick way to do homework.

But for the tech industry, it’s like a whole new, glorious frontier and they are talking about it with extraordinary zeal. That’s partly the result of huge investor interest in anything remotely related to AI.

During the presentation, Van Dijk said “GenAI” is nothing short of “a generational shift in tech”. It is in a similar order of magnitude to the internet itself, he said. (I am not making this up.) 

So, what changes can we expect? Two, in a broad sense, says Van Dijk. First, it will lead to productivity increases in almost every profession. And second, business models will become foundationally better. Newer companies that use GenAI effectively will be the new disruptors.

All of this works well in the Naspers/Prosus playbook, according to the execs. The company is invested in something called Stack Overflow, which is an enormously popular website that helps tech developers design “solutions”. That now gets some immediate and tangible jet fuel with the help of GenAI. Or, alternatively, it becomes a competitor?

I must say, it is fascinating to use something like ChatGPT to help build a program or a routine within a larger program. The speed, efficiency, and accuracy of its code generation is something to behold and boggles the mind. You can keep tweaking the code just by asking additional and different questions until you get a response that works. You can ask it where the bugs are in your code. It must be a huge help to programmers.

It’s easy to see how the process of program development will change. The pendulum will shift from the great implementers of code to programmers who really know how to ask the most effective questions and those who have an imaginative sense of what is possible.

So, big disruption there.

But what about the idea of GenAI improving business models? How will this actually work in practice?

As one example, I asked a banker how they were using AI now, rather than as a futuristic, conceptual tool. He said that for one thing, they have given ChatGPT to their call centre employees. Any time you ask someone at the call centre a question for which they don’t have the answer, they punch it into ChatGPT and read you that answer. Obviously, you could have done that yourself, but some people prefer to just ask someone directly and still have the expectation that it’s not ChatGPT providing the answer. Silly, really.

But given some of the call centres to which I have been put through in the past, may I just say that this is a very good idea because often what mystified attendants tend to come up with on their own is either absurdly obvious or legally actionable.

Naspers/Prosus, which has a whole fleet of companies in its stable either as investment punts or wholly owned, is thinking of ways to use AI within its businesses. It maintains that the applications are huge.

But I have to say I don’t see anything on the scale of the internet happening any time soon. It’s exciting obviously; but a “generational shift”? Hmm. Not sure; we will have to see. DM