In response to rising demand and the accelerated adoption of agentic AI across multiple industry verticals, 4Sight Holdings is investing R20 million over the next two years to develop relevant industry solutions. Generative AI focuses on creating new content (text, images, code, etc) based on learned patterns, while agentic AI acts as an autonomous agent, making decisions and taking actions to achieve specific goals without constant human oversight.
The company’s advisory panel, led by CEO Tertius Zitzke, evaluates ideas to determine which to focus on. It has already identified six key projects from a pipeline of 150 concepts, with R8 million deployed to date to bring these high-impact solutions to market.
According to 4Sight Holdings' Zitzke, the company is focused on developing 4Sight Automated Intelligence (4AI) solutions that address specific business challenges in today’s technology advanced world, to improve efficiencies in business operations and thus generate new revenue streams for the 4Sight Group.
“Our strategy focuses on looking at a customer's operation from the outside in, then leveraging technology to develop solutions that drive transformation in five key pillars within the business, namely people, stakeholders, operations, finance and innovation,” says Zitzke.
“The aim is not to replace humans, but rather support their roles to give them more time to service customers, collaborate with vendors or focus on value-adding tasks within the business, while also extracting greater value from company assets. The biggest characteristic of agentic AI is the integration with external data models to support decision-making for business.”
Zitzke offers an example of how agentic AI – AI that can make decisions rather than make suggestions or offer guidelines, like generative or advisory AI – is transforming new employee onboarding to accelerate the process and reduce the burden on human resource (HR) departments.
“Onboarding starts when the person signs a contract, not on their first day on the job. Automating this process with agentic AI ensures the incoming employee receives the information they need, completes the necessary paperwork and reviews the necessary collateral and policies and procedures before they collect their laptop on the first day.”
Automating financial roles, such as procurement, streamlines application processes and significantly reduces the administrative burden, with the ability to monitor credit controls and procedures to detect issues or potential fraud or theft better than any human.
“Agentic AI can approve purchases under a certain threshold according to specified rules, automatically processing the payments and allocating the expenses, which means every line item no longer needs manual approvals.”
Sales and marketing are other areas of the business where agentic AI adoption can have a significant impact, continues Zitzke.
“Agentic AI can more accurately measure and determine return on investment (ROI) from money spent on an event, or analyse metrics like reach, impact and ROI on social media or online marketing spend.”
Agentic AI can also boost campaign impact by analysing who liked a post or read an online article and determining if this person is an existing or potential customer to serve relevant and personalised content to generate a sale or capture them.
Beyond sales and marketing, Zitzke says agentic AI also supports related roles in vendor relationships and community management, with the ability to automate numerous roles and functions, which allows internal teams to focus on value-adding tasks.
The six 4Sight AI (4AI) projects are currently under development, either as pilot projects or at a minimum viable project (MVP) stage and are available to customers. The latter includes the 4AI Reliability Information Assistant, or 4RIA, and 4cast solutions.
Developed by 4Sight Operational Technologies and built on Microsoft architecture, the 4RIA solution integrates industrial AI and agentic AI to deliver a powerful rules-based reliability tool for engineers and operators in the mining, oil and gas sectors.
“With the ability to cross-analyse structured and unstructured information, the solution blends data from various sources for a holistic view of operations,” explains Zitzke.
“With one click, operators gain a real-time overview of asset health to support predictive maintenance, gaining actionable insights and tailored recommendations to enhance decision-making, which empowers them to work smarter and faster.”
4Sight has also developed 4cast, a cutting-edge data management solution designed to integrate multiple data sources into Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse. This solution is ideal for finance, HR and operations, as well as sales, compliance and audit, and data analysts and business intelligence (BI) teams.
“With seamless data integration across ERP, HRP, web and PowerApps, and automated data transformation, machine learning-driven advanced forecasting and real-time reporting, 4cast empowers businesses with data-driven, actionable insights to predict sales and workforce trends, and inform decisions," elaborates Zitzke.
Of the R8 million already deployed, 80% has been approved and allocated to projects, with roughly 66.5% spent, and delivered a ROI of 66% in FY25.
“We expect this figure to rise in FY26 as AI helps us refine the development of new solutions,” continues Zitzke.
4Sight expects to deploy the remaining R10 million over the remainder of the 2026 financial year into new projects identified by the AI advisory panel.
Additional agentic AI projects in the pipeline include an update to the 4flow process automation solution designed to enhance efficiency, streamline workflows and drive business growth, and the launch of 4adopt, an AI maturity model and responsible AI framework for businesses.
Zitzke believes this focus on integrating AI into existing vendor solutions will position 4Sight favourably in a rapidly changing software industry.
“In a sector where established providers that still operate with the traditional software distribution model are laying off staff, 4Sight continues to realise quarter-on-quarter growth as we infuse business solutions with agentic AI that can leverage their data to make businesses better.”
Zitzke firmly believes the box-dropping software solution providers that relied on licensing revenue are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and that providers that can offer value-added services built around automation and AI will dominate the market.
“The tools and technologies are there; it is merely the business use cases that are lacking. This is where we aim to make a difference with our focused investments. By leveraging AI, we can help businesses get more value from the vendor solutions they use every day,” continues Zitzke.
“Our commitment to invest R20 million to develop bespoke solutions that emphasise AI is a cornerstone of our strategy. Our ongoing plans to develop AI-powered solutions that address real-world customer challenges will ensure both practical value and a competitive edge,” he concludes.
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