• Salesforce is eyeing an Africa-wide expansion, with South Africa serving as a lynchpin for its plans.
• This is according to its South African solutions engineer, Linda Saunders, who says that Salesforce will use the country as a “springboard” to head into other continental markets.
• Saunders says that the company’s latest innovation, Einstein GPT, can help African companies overcome a gap in technical skills.

South Africa is the fastest growing market for software vendor Salesforce, one of the largest tech firms in the world by sheer market capitalisation, at least in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region (EMEA). It is the second market that the American company has established on the continent, preceded only by Morocco.

Citing an IDC report, the company says that it will help create 31 800 new jobs in South Africa, as well as generate $5.1 billion in local business revenue.

“We are growing our ecosystem in terms of our customer base, but we are also super focused on growing the business organically but making sure that we bring the country along with us,” beams Linda Saunders (seen in the header image above), director of Solution Engineering at Salesforce South Africa, whose job it is to make us excited about Salesforce’s products.

We had a chance to chat with Saunders at the Salesforce World Tour Essentials event held in Kyalami, Johannesburg on Wednesday.

Here she tells us something we had been hearing all day at that point, that South Africa is an important market for Salesforce, not only because the development of its business and industry sector supplies fresh customers but because it is a gateway to the enormous potential of Sub-Saharan Africa.

“We’re using South Africa as a springboard to develop and take the rest of Africa with us,” Saunders told Hypertext. “[Africa VP Zuko Mdwaba] and I started in the role of looking after the South African market but very quickly took over the role of the rest of Africa as well.”

“There’s great opportunity [in the rest of Africa]. There’s some incredible businesses in Africa. Many people who come from overseas see Africa and realise there is so much innovation, so much vibrance here. And we [Africans] have so much to offer the world,” she continues.

Apart from innovation, there are also ripe customers and industries. In Nigeria alone, customers and businesses made over 300 million digital transactions a month, according to Business Day Nigeria. And that was in 2019.

The West African nation, apart from being the most populous with 213 million people, is considered the technology hub of the continent, where leading startups propel themselves unto the world scene with innovative technologies that target Africa’s huge, young and unconnected population with software and products that make lives more convenient.

That’s exactly what Salesforce does with its customer relationship management (CRM) technology, especially its latest advancements in artificial intelligence. During the keynote, Saunders demoed Salesforce’s latest version of Einstein GPT, which launched in South Africa and worldwide on Monday.

One part of the presentation saw Salesforce engineers ask Einstein GPT to create a webpage for a Formula 1 website, and it did so in an instant, complete with images and other media, to the shock and horror of the developers who were among the crowd.

Saunders says that the local market is definitely asking the company and looking into AI advancements like ChatGPT, from which Einstein GPT borrows a piece of its large language model. She says that customers in Africa are worried that they may have missed out on the AI revolution.

The world’s leading technology companies are rushing to catch up to OpenAI, which quietly launched ChatGPT in November last year. The likes of Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon and now Salesforce are also looking for a piece of the pie.

“For Africa, we’re always looking at things that can save us costs. And we’re always looking into how to increase productivity. I think AI like Einstein unlocks a lot of value for companies, which is really critical in the African context,” Saunders explains.

She says that the capabilities of Einstein GPT, creating websites from scratch without needing to know how to code, using company data to enable extremely personalised customer service, and the fact that it can even write Apex code for you will be something that African firms can use to their advantage due to continent-wide skills shortages.

“Einstein allows African countries to surpass the gap that they have in terms of digitisation. These technologies can fill the skills gap so that African companies can compete at the world level,” she says.

Saunders says that apart from its innovations being of benefit to Africa, it is also doing its part in local communities. The San Francisco-based company, which recently opened an office space in Rosebank, Johannesburg, provides its CRM software free of charge to charitable organisations in South Africa.

One of which is Rise Against Hunger Africa, which uses Salesforce’s CRM to organise its charitable contributions and communications.

“We are super excited to grow the business, grow the skills and also uplift our communities while we do well,” Saunders concludes.