The boom in AI and its embrace by tech players has fundamentally changed Naspers’s operating model.
In a recent presentation, Naspers boss Fabricio Bloisi described the group’s shift from being an e-commerce giant to a “global-class AI company”. At its core, the shift has seen the group going from tech investor to e-commerce operator to AI platform.
When Bloisi took the reins at the JSE’s largest tech player in mid-2024, he ushered in a new chapter that saw the group and its international unit Prosus moving away from a somewhat “passive” investor stance to becoming an operator of the various companies in its portfolio.
The pressure on companies, their executives and boards to understand and create value from the technology has presented an opportunity that Bloisi and his team are fully taking advantage of.
For the first time in the two decades that the group has operated as primarily a tech investor, the Naspers stable has developed and is now offering its own AI platform to the market.
In October, the group launched its suite of large commerce models (LCMs), a set of agentic AI systems it hopes will replace traditional search and recommendation engines.
“LCM is to e-commerce what a personal shopper is to a department store — only it costs consumers nothing extra, stays with you over time, and improves every time you use it,” Bloisi said at the time.
This is part of a growing trend regarding AI-powered agents, known as “agentic AI”, taking over more tasks from human beings, for example, an agent that works like a personal assistant, making bookings, creating meetings and summarising notes and other important information.
“This is a whole new operating system for e-commerce. This will be available to our global network of companies we have invested in — adding immediate value to their tech stack, way beyond what they could develop on their own,” Bloisi said.
If successful, the Naspers stable has an opportunity to offer the technology to the broader e-commerce market, competing for enterprise business with providers such as Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI.
The group has already begun this push, with its Toqan AI platform being opened up to 5-million restaurant, hotel and dealer partners to provide automated marketing, finance and planning agents.
AI investment has grown exponentially in recent years, driven by the rapid adoption and popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT since it was launched in November 2022.
Companies worldwide have felt the pressure to capitalise on the trend by employing AI-backed services or software platforms to either improve their own operations or create products.
Since the LCMs came into effect, the group has continued to develop the technology, refining its use cases through its businesses. With that foundation, Bloisi has now outlined a major shift in how users will interact with digital services over the next one to two years.
He sees a move beyond simple information-sharing assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini to systems that perform actions. The goal, he said, is for a user to say “do that for me” — such as ordering food, booking tickets, or paying bills — and have the agent handle the entire process.
Using the iFood app as an example, Bloisi notes that users currently take an average of five minutes to order. Prosus aims to reduce this to one minute through an assistant that already knows one’s preferences, location and payment methods.
Prosus, which has been investing in AI since 2018, is leveraging its massive scale — made up of over 1-billion customers and 5-million partners — to build its specialised AI.
Ultimately, Bloisi envisions a future where entire organisations are run by autonomous agents that provide strategic options to founders and CEOs.
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