EP 40 | Pay-on-Proof AI: How Isazi.ai Turned Clients into Evangelists

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Practical AI beats hype. In this Singularity Summit episode of The Angle, Ashley Anthony - co-founder & CEO, Isazi.ai explains how a bootstrapped AI company grew to 110 people by solving specific customer problems first—then choosing the tech.

He unpacks Isazi’s first-principles approach - translate business issues into mathematical problems - the pay-on-proof/money-back guarantees that built evangelists, and why South Africa’s advanced banking & supply chains made it a strong testbed long before global expansion.

Ashley introduces two products:

Hudson — a data river engine for cleaning, preparing, predicting, and optimising; e.g., forecasting thousands of SKUs and optimising distribution.

Sophia — end-to-end document automation using multiple LLMs plus a human-in-the-loop layer (crowdsourced micro-tasks to unemployed youth) to eliminate low-confidence extractions and run high-volume processing.

He closes with a founder’s mindset: curiosity beats tools; define the question, read widely, and let math + execution do the work.

Chapters / timestamps

00:00 – Intro
00:40 – “Practical applications of AI” & Isazi’s bootstrapped origin story
02:46 – Team size (110), global footprint, and problem-first market view
04:40 – How bootstrapping shaped guarantees & customer evangelists
06:38 – First principles: understand the problem; be tool-agnostic
08:35 – Why South Africa (banks, supply chains) enabled scaling
09:44 – Market realities, red tape, and focusing on practical value
13:10 – Business model: ~30% consulting, ~70% product licensing
14:09 – Hudson: data “river” → clean, predict, optimise (SKU forecasting example)
16:10 – Sophia: LLM document automation + human-in-the-loop micro-jobs
17:46 – Data stance: no customer data ownership; cloud or on-prem options
18:45 – On AI fear & adoption: “that debate is over”
21:25 – “Africa has broken the border”: solve problems with what you have
22:30 – Misprioritised AI (chatbots) vs real ROI (revenue up or cost down)
24:52 – Curiosity story (library metaphor): ask better questions, learn faster
29:56 – Goal: solve a client problem in one week; push toward one day
31:32 – Why mathematical thinking is the edge (team & approach)
32:38 – Close

#TheAnglePodcast #AshleyAnthony #IsaziAI #PracticalAI #AIROI #DocumentAutomation #HumanInTheLoop #SupplyChain #DataEngineering #SouthAfricaTech

Produced and published by Submedia.co.za
31 Dec 2025 English South Africa Technology · Business

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