Full Press Release

FirstStep today announced the latest release of FirstStep One, its private AI platform for African organisations. The latest release expands the platform to include Chat, Image Generation, Audio Transcription, Data Analysis (Beta) and Coding (Beta), bringing together a growing suite of AI tools into a single platform. Powered by modern open-source AI models running on recommended on-premise hardware, FirstStep One enables organisations to adopt AI while keeping company data under their own control.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere nowadays. Everyone is either using it or is curious about it. In the workplace, AI is changing the way we think about productivity.

A study by MIT has shown that AI can increase productivity by 14-40% across many knowledge-work tasks, with some software development tasks being completed up to twice as fast (Source 1). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently remarked: "Companies that are not set up to quickly adopt AI workers will be at a huge disadvantage." (Source 2)

Using SaaS providers such as OpenAI, Claude or Gemini is a quick win. Sign up for around $20 per month and off you go. All the latest AI tools are at your disposal.

How are companies using AI? AI tools are inherently non-deterministic, meaning they cannot reliably produce exactly the same answer twice. Because of this, we don't use AI directly for deterministic production tasks. Instead, we use AI to create systems and processes that are deterministic and reliable. For example: new Excel spreadsheets, reports, workflows and software programs.

But there is a hidden cost. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has warned that organisations effectively pay twice for AI: first through the subscription, and second through the value of the data they share (Source 3). Every prompt sent to OpenAI, Gemini or Claude may contain your hard-earned intellectual property, workflows, customer data and confidential information, all of which are shared with third-party providers.

Compliance teams are increasingly raising concerns. They recognise the value AI tools offer, but they are worried about confidential information leaving the organisation, customer data being shared, finances being exposed, regulatory compliance (such as POPIA) and the impact on brand reputation.

At FirstStep, we've spent more than a decade deploying AI in demanding industrial environments where systems are expected to operate reliably 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our largest deployment is with AB InBev across Africa, where AI-powered quality inspection units monitor production lines, demonstrating that AI can be successfully deployed on-premise in mission-critical environments.

That experience naturally led to the next engineering challenge: bringing the same principles of reliability, privacy and on-premise computing to generative AI.

The result is FirstStep One, a privacy-first AI platform that enables African organisations to run modern open-source AI models on their own hardware, keeping company data under their own control while reducing ongoing API token costs. By bringing together Chat, Image Generation, Audio Transcription, Data Analysis and Coding into a single platform, organisations can standardise on one AI environment rather than managing multiple AI subscriptions and services.

Technology alone, however, is not enough. Successfully adopting AI requires people, processes and governance. In addition to providing the platform, FirstStep offers videos and workplace training to help organisations adopt AI in a way that delivers measurable business value.

So how can organisations embrace AI safely?

We recommend three practical steps:

1) Create an AI policy for your organisation, defining which AI tools may be used and how company data should be handled (generate a free AI Policy for your organization).
2) Invest in on-premise AI hardware that meets your organisation's requirements. Thanks to open-source AI models, this is becoming surprisingly affordable.
3) Encourage and train your team to use AI responsibly to improve productivity.

"As AI models continue to improve year after year, organisations aren't simply investing in AI today. By combining on-premise hardware with open-source AI models that are automatically updated as new ones are released, companies are equipping their organisations with an AI strategy for the future," says Leen Remmelzwaal, Senior Technical Consultant at FirstStep.

More information about FirstStep One is available at https://firststep.ai.