We build AI for work that has to hold up.
Affilio is a South African AI development house. We build AI solutions for enterprises — end to end, on their own evidence, on infrastructure they control. Viki, Lumen and Argon are our own products, built the same way, and they are the proof rather than the point.
We build AI that survives contact with a board.
Most enterprise AI demos well and dies quietly. It ships, and eighteen months later nobody can say what changed. We build the other kind — and we will tell you when the answer is that you should not build it at all.
Solutions, end to end
From whether it should be built at all, through the data, governance and lawful basis that make it defensible, to the thing running in production with evidence behind every claim. One team across the whole arc, not a strategy deck handed to somebody else to implement.
Born out of large enterprise
The method came from reading enterprise estates at their most tangled — SAP scale, decades of custom code, integrations nobody has mapped. That is why we start with your data, your integration reality and your governance, long before anyone mentions a model.
Risk-free adoption
Every use case is gated before it is scored. Anything without a lawful basis or a named owner is stopped rather than averaged into a shortlist that cannot ship. And it runs on infrastructure you choose — in South Africa, or inside your own boundary.
Our own products are the proof: Viki, Lumen and Argon were built exactly this way, on real evidence, with the honest answer when the honest answer was no.
The same idea, in two different rooms
A board deciding on a platform programme and a funder deciding whether a training grant was well spent have nothing in common except the thing they cannot get: evidence that was generated while the work happened, rather than assembled afterwards by someone with an interest in the answer.
That is the whole company. Viki produces it for an assessment. Lumen produces it for a programme. Argon means it never has to leave the country to be produced at all.
- 01Viki
Assessment and advisory. Reads the estate, holds a scored position, compiles the deliverables from it.
- 02Lumen
Programme delivery and assurance. Runs the work, and the verification evidence falls out of it.
- 03Argon
Sovereign AI infrastructure. Shared, dedicated, inside your own environment, or a named provider where you elect it.
Why this exists
Large assessment engagements have a structural problem: the reading is the expensive part, and it is the part that gets compressed. A team of seven spends five weeks, most of it gathering and skimming, and the findings that reach the board are the ones that survived somebody's memory of week two.
We built Viki to invert that. The platform reads everything, holds a scored position with the evidence attached, and compiles the deliverables from that stored position. The people spend their time on judgement and challenge, which is what they were hired for.
Argon followed from the first serious client question about it: where does our data go? For a South African organisation with a regulator, “a data centre in Virginia” is not an answer. So we built the version where the honest answer is “here, and you choose where here is.”
We are not a software vendor selling seats, and we are not a body shop. We sell assessments with a defined output, delivered on a platform we happen to own.
Whether an assessment is worth commissioning at all is a fair question to put to us, and we will answer it straight — including when the answer costs us the engagement.
Four things we hold to.
Evidence over opinion
If we cannot show you where a finding came from, it does not go in the report.
Candour over comfort
We will name the thing nobody in the room wants named. That is most of what you are paying for.
Sovereignty by default
Your data stays where you decide it stays. The platform is built so that is a real choice.
Speed that is real
Weeks rather than quarters — because the reading is automated, not because the work is thinner.
South African owned and operated.
Affilio (Pty) Ltd
Registration number 2025/603747/07
Fourways, Johannesburg
We do not publish a credential we cannot evidence on the day you ask for it.
Named on every engagement.
Shamit Maharaj — Founder
Twenty-five years in enterprise technology, most of them running the practice rather than working in it: Partner at KPMG, Executive Director at EY, practice head at Atos and at PwC — each of those roles Africa-wide — with time at SAP itself along the way. FMCG, retail, mining, manufacturing, financial services and the public sector.
Large programmes from every side: sold, staffed, delivered, and rescued. Affilio came out of that. He designed Viki and its four assessment modules, and leads the Argon work that keeps them running in South Africa.
You will know who is doing the work before you sign, and they will be the people in the room at handover.
Ask us something hard.
The quickest way to judge an assessment firm is to give it a question it has an incentive to fudge.