The Spiritus Knowledge Hub

Intelligence from the workshop

Field notes, reviews, and ideas from the Spiritus team — frontier AI for SADC business, written by the people building it.

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Ideology6 min read

There Is Nobody Left to Replace

In Zimbabwean agriculture, the useful question is how AI can extend the reach of expertise.

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Ernest Jolomos

San Francisco

03 Oct 2026

Use Cases9 min read

Building an Agronomy Agent That Knows When to Stop

A proposed retrieval, clarification and escalation architecture for agricultural advisory in Zimbabwe.

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Ernest Jolomos

San Francisco

03 Oct 2026

AI Updates7 min read

How GPT-4o Is Reshaping SADC Supply Chains

Draft preview · Full article not yet published

Frontier multimodal models are no longer a Western luxury — we break down exactly where GPT-4o is creating leverage in Southern African logistics and procurement workflows.

Mako

Founder & AI Architect

01 Oct 2025

Reviews9 min read

Claude 3.5 Sonnet Reviewed: Enterprise-Ready for Southern Africa?

Draft preview · Full article not yet published

We put Claude 3.5 Sonnet through its paces on real SADC business documents — contracts, RFPs, cross-border compliance forms. Here is what held up and what surprised us.

Jerome

Lead Engineer

28 Sept 2025

Use Cases6 min read

Automating Vendor Onboarding with AI Agents

Draft preview · Full article not yet published

Manual vendor onboarding costs finance teams days per new supplier. We walk through the agentic workflow we built that cuts that to under two hours — no human in the loop for routine cases.

Donnovan

Solutions Engineer

25 Sept 2025

Case Studies11 min read

Field Notes: Building an AI Workflow for a Zimbabwean Logistics Firm

Draft preview · Full article not yet published

Low bandwidth, inconsistent connectivity, mixed document formats. A look at the constraints we actually faced deploying an agentic system in Harare — and how we solved them.

Jolo

Product & Strategy

20 Sept 2025

Ideology8 min read

Why Agentic AI Will Define the Next Decade in Africa

Draft preview · Full article not yet published

Africa’s infrastructure gap is not a liability for AI adoption — it is an accelerant. The regions that leapfrogged landlines for mobile will do the same with automation. Here is our thesis.

Mako

Founder & AI Architect

03 Oct 2025

AI Updates10 min read

The State of AI Regulation in Southern Africa

Draft preview · Full article not yet published

SADC governments are moving — some faster than others. We map the current regulatory landscape, the gaps that matter for enterprise deployments, and what to watch in the next 12 months.

Jerome

Lead Engineer

15 Sept 2025

Reviews12 min read

Gemini 1.5 Pro vs GPT-4o for Document Processing

Draft preview · Full article not yet published

Two frontier models, one task: extracting structured data from messy SADC trade documents. We ran 500 real documents through both. The results are not what you would expect.

Donnovan

Solutions Engineer

10 Sept 2025

Use Cases8 min read

Deploying AI for Cross-Border Trade Compliance

Draft preview · Full article not yet published

SADC trade corridors involve up to nine document types per shipment. We built an agent that validates, flags, and routes compliance issues in real time. Here is the architecture.

Jolo

Product & Strategy

05 Sept 2025

Case Studies14 min read

Lessons from Our First Enterprise Agent Deployment

Draft preview · Full article not yet published

Twelve weeks. One large client. More edge cases than we planned for. This is an honest account of what we learned shipping our first production agentic system into a Southern African enterprise.

Mako

Founder & AI Architect

30 Aug 2025