Following the grand opening of the Nutun AI Operations Centre on 18 June in Sandton, group CTIO Hans Zachar unpacks the gruelling two-year backend modernisation journey required to bring an agentic AI debt collector to life.
South African-based business process outsourcing group Nutun, unveiled its new dedicated AI Operations Centre in Johannesburg, introducing its home-grown AI voice agent, named Zoey, that functions as a debt collector.
While Zoey stunned attendees with a demonstration at the launch of her front-end capabilities as an AI interacting with human customers at scale, Nutun group CTIO Hans Zachar told CIO South Africa that the real challenge lies deep within the legacy infrastructure.
Hans explained that the Johannesburg facility serves as their collections hub, following the earlier launch of a customer service-focused innovation lab in Durban, adding that sourcing the artificial intelligence was actually the easiest part of the project.
“As it turns out, the AI part of it isn’t the difficult one, so we use best-in-class tools, world-class leading platforms to build out the AI,” he said. “The majority of the work is really integrating it into your architecture and your systems to make Zoey work in the real-time nature which AI demands.”
To achieve this, the IT team had to embark on a significant modernisation of their existing systems. Hans explained that while the core functionality and industry expertise remained embedded in the software, the backend required a completely refreshed architecture to enable the AI to perform at an enterprise level.
A unique learning curve
“Zoey is the culmination of two years working with AI, really understanding the technology, but then integrating the entire platform, so that we can bring the industry expertise to the AI use case,” he said.
Reflecting on the journey, Hans admitted that the rapid advancement of the technology created a unique learning curve. He noted that delaying the project by six months might have allowed the developers to learn the early lessons, but getting involved right when ChatGPT first launched had offered them a distinct advantage.
“In a lot of ways, we started to understand AI at the lowest level possible,” he explained. “So, we’ve grown with the AI. As AI advances, we’ve advanced, and I think just understanding it at a sort of a fundamental level has helped us to get to that scaling quicker, probably quicker than we would have.”
Ultimately, this ground-level integration has left the organisation with a highly resilient technical foundation. “I think what we have now is an incredibly robust, scalable architecture that will serve us well way into the future,” Hans added.
Taking over menial tasks
Nutun South Africa CEO Robert Amoils told attendees at the launch that the AI agent was actively working at scale, noting that Zoey had been collecting on over 80,000 of its principal portfolio accounts and had already collected over R40 million in outstanding debt.
When it comes to the ultimate fear of artificial intelligence replacing human jobs, Robert argued that the reality is far from a binary substitution.
While the company initially anticipated shedding a significant portion of its workforce following the deployment of Zoey, it quickly discovered that employees had instead evolved alongside the technology.
Rather than eliminating human roles entirely, the AI has taken over menial tasks, allowing the workforce to act as a vital augmentation to the system. “The workforce itself changes to support Zoey, like the computer before it or email,” Robert explained. “We don't see a shedding of the workforce, we see the workforce growing, but the output and what it can accommodate being far more valuable to our clients.”
