On 11 March 2026, Sage Group hosted a briefing in Johannesburg to introduce Sage AI to the Africa and Middle East market. The session brought together regional executives and product specialists to outline how the company is embedding artificial intelligence into its finance, HR and payroll platforms for small and midsize businesses.
Jordaan Burger, managing director for Africa and the Middle East at Sage, opened the briefing by outlining the operational pressures facing SMBs in South Africa. He said business owners are spending too much time on routine administrative work such as invoicing, collections, compliance submissions and system checks.
“Small and midsize businesses in South Africa are a driving and thriving force and they’re definitely not short on ambition, but they are short on time,” Jordaan said. According to Jordaan, companies that benefit from AI will be those that deploy it within trusted platforms rather than adopting standalone tools.
“The businesses that will thrive in this era are not the businesses that just adopt AI. It's the businesses that understand where they need to deploy AI using trusted vendors,” he said. Jordaan added that trust is a critical requirement when AI is applied to financial, HR and payroll systems.
“When it comes to AI, trust is absolutely key, particularly when working with finance, HR and payroll systems. Getting the numbers mostly right is not right enough. That’s why trust is the deciding factor,” he said.
Inside Sage AI
Sage describes Sage AI as a human-first intelligence engine trained on financial, accounting, payroll and HR data. Sophia Adhami, senior director in the product office and product performance execution at Sage, said the company’s AI development is guided by customer workflows rather than technology trends.
“We’re not just building it because we think it’s a good thing. We’re actually looking at real workflows and trying to find real opportunities to save time and give small and medium-sized businesses productivity gains back,” Sophia said.
With Copilot embedded across Sage’s product portfolio, the company aims to provide a consistent user experience across its platforms. Sophia adds that Sage trains its AI models on one customer’s dataset at a time. Customer data is anonymised, not shared across other organisations, and used only to improve functionality for that specific environment.
Trust was a recurring theme throughout the briefing, with Sophia outlining how the company builds accuracy controls through confidence indicators on AI outputs and a feedback loop from users.
She also said Sage aligns its development practices with international regulatory frameworks, including the EU AI Act. The company has also introduced an AI trust label within some products. The feature allows customers to view the standards and data practices associated with a specific AI capability.
“I think of it a bit like a food label. When you pick up something in the supermarket, you want to know what’s in it. That’s what this function does,” she explained.
Compliance and human oversight
Yolandi Esterhuizen, global product compliance and trust director at Sage, said compliance requirements are integrated into the AI design process from the outset.
She gave the example of a payroll variance detected by a Sage AI agent. The system can identify the change, record the event and present the reasoning behind its suggestion. However, it cannot execute financial adjustments without human approval.
“The human stays in control for visibility, accuracy and ultimately all actions are auditable, which is what our regulators expect,” Yolandi said.
When asked how Sage plans to support markets where many SMMEs still operate with limited digitisation or connectivity, Sophia said the company focuses on embedding AI functionality directly into its products.
This allows businesses to digitise specific workflows incrementally and begin seeing operational benefits. Early use cases often include cash flow visibility and faster payment collection.
Jordaan linked the opportunity for AI adoption to broader economic pressures affecting South African businesses. He referenced recent changes to the VAT registration threshold as an example of why some companies delay technology investment, but said compliance alone should not drive digital adoption.
“Compliance is the absolute minimum outcome. Technology should be used in businesses to get ahead, to thrive and beat your competitors,” he concluded.
