Your AI prototype is not a product yet, and South African firms are being paid to finish it

A working prototype and a product you can put in front of customers are two different things, and a South African software company is now selling the gap between them.

Codehesion is advertising a service that takes an AI-built prototype and turns it into something a business can release to the public, according to reporting by MyBroadband. The pitch is aimed squarely at the wave of ideas people have already got running with AI tools and now want to take further.

The company’s offer is that clients hand over the technical work and keep ownership of the finished solution. In its own description, the client is outsourcing the engineering side of making the idea real.

What that means in practice is a team assembled around the project rather than a single developer. Codehesion says each of its innovation pods comes with architecture, user experience, business analysis, quality assurance, project management, DevOps and engineering skills. It also says it builds AI tools into the way that team works, and that clients still get the experience of its own developers alongside those tools.

The company’s claim is that the result is a prototype turned into a commercially viable product, ready for release.

For a South African reader sitting on a prototype, the pitch raises a practical question rather than a philosophical one. A prototype that demos well can still be missing the parts that make software survive contact with real users, such as who tests it, who runs it once it is live, and who manages the work when it grows. Codehesion is charging for those parts.

Its case for why it should be the one doing that work leans on an awards record. The company says the MyBroadband Awards have named it the country’s leading software development company for three years in a row, and it points to roughly 100 projects delivered, with the work growing more complex as clients’ needs have changed. Those are the company’s own claims about itself, made in its advertising.

That is a thin evidentiary base for a business decision, and it is worth being clear about what it is. The awards title is a publisher’s award, the project count is the company’s own figure, and neither tells a reader whether the team suits a particular product. What a business can check is narrower and more useful: who exactly will be on the project, what the client keeps, what happens to the code and the data, and what the company is committing to deliver before anyone signs.

The broader South African context is that AI tools have made it cheap to get an idea to a working demo, and have not made it cheap to run a product in production. The distance between those two points is where a market for this kind of work has opened up, and where money is now being asked for.

Codehesion is inviting prospective clients to book a free consultation through its advertisement. Nothing in the material sets out pricing, timelines, contract terms or the size of the teams on offer, so a reader weighing the pitch has the company’s account of its own record and not much else to go on.

The Enquirer will keep asking South African technology firms to put specifics behind their claims, including what a client actually gets, what it costs and what the company will be held to.

Source: MyBroadband, How to get your Claude prototype app to scale for business use.