- Stef Adonis, Chief Evangelist
years in business
users reached
active users every month
uptime
We helped them turn WhatsApp self-service into its number one channel, handling 1.6 billion messages since 2019, supporting 11.2 million unique customers at a CSAT score of 84%. We've also helped them generate 250,000 new leads along the way. That's more than just a chatbot answering FAQs, it's a full sales engine inside a messaging app.
MoneyUp Chat has brought financial education to over 300,000 people, with 91% of registered users starting a course and completion rates sitting between 92% and 97% per challenge - rare numbers for educational content.
We helped them revamp their digital assistant Alfred, processing 100 million messages and saving millions along the way. With 260,000 average monthly users at 99% uptime, this has made important routine interactions a breeze for both Eskom and their user base.
They saw a fourfold increase in leads and a fivefold increase in self-service usage year on year, with cost per lead dropping by a factor of four.
Our omnichannel overhaul with MTN was built on 3,280 hours of research, 150 customer interviews, and 4,350 surveys, mapping nine current-state journeys that printed out stretched twelve metres across a wall. The bottom line is that we reduced the upgrade time to just over 20 minutes.
We're proud of our work, and it’s nice to have some silverware to show for it, too. So many of our awards were won in partnership with our amazing clients, based on the work we have co-created with them. And occasionally we have been fortunate enough to be recognised for our impact as an organisation.
2025 was a genuinely good year. Helm picked up Best AI-Powered Customer Experience Solution (South Africa) at the MEA Markets awards, and both Best AI Customer Experience Company (Africa) and the Marketing Automation Innovation Award at the Business Excellence Awards.
At the Smarties Sub-Saharan Africa awards, the DStv Digital Agent brought home gold for Diversity & Inclusive Excellence, silver for AI Marketing, and bronze for Personalisation.
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Customer experience has moved through three distinct eras.
Back then, you had almost no control as a customer. You couldn't look anything up yourself, compare your options, or get anything done without someone's help. So the quality of an experience came down to how good that person was at making up for your powerlessness. The better the bank teller or the shop assistant, the better the experience, because they were your only route to getting anything done.
For the last twenty years, every storefront and workflow got raced onto a screen, and suddenly you didn't need someone's help to check your balance or place an order – you could just do it yourself. Value shifted from "how good is the person helping me" to "how much can I do without needing anyone at all."
Digital transformation made things faster in South African enterprises, but it also quietly removed the person who used to help you. AI is what puts that person back. Not literally, but functionally. A good AI-powered assistant can explain, reassure, and adapt the way a good employee once did, at a scale no employee ever could. Value today isn't about how slick the screen is. It's about whether the thing on the other end of the conversation understands you and helps.
To be clear, that's not about replacing the humans still in the building either. It's about giving them power back. Every repetitive question answered by an assistant is a question your best people never have to answer for the thousandth time. What's left for them is the work that needed a person in the first place: the complicated cases, the upset customers, the moments that genuinely call for judgement. Good AI doesn't shrink the human role. It clears the noise around it.
That's why we've never called ourselves an AI vendor. A vendor sells the model and moves on. We design, build, and manage AI-powered customer experiences end-to-end, because putting the human touch back into a digital experience isn't a one-time thing, it's an ongoing relationship long after the deployment.
AI is everywhere.
Everyone's selling it.
Everyone’s buying it.
But buying it is not the same as having something that works, and keeps working.
That gap between the AI you bought and the customer experience you actually need is the one we exist to close.
Twenty-three years, 500 million users reached, and a handful of awards later, our value is the same as it's always been: not a tool, a partnership. We design it, we build it, and we stay to manage it. We're the large enterprise AI partner South African businesses call on for CX innovation in Southern Africa, when they need it to keep working, not just switch on.
We’re ready to talk when you are.
Helm designs, builds, and manages AI-powered customer experiences end-to-end. We don't just sell AI and disappear — we stay in the relationship, running the customer journey, the model choice, and the day-to-day performance of it, so businesses get a working AI customer service solution rather than a tool that quietly stops delivering value six months in.
We focus on eight: Financial Services, Telecommunications, Retail, Utilities, Healthcare, Government, Automotive, and Logistics — though the real qualifier isn't the industry, it's the scale. Wherever a South African enterprise serves large volumes of customers or employees, there's usually a case for AI customer experience solutions built specifically for South Africa's market conditions.
A chatbot answers a scripted question and stops there. A digital agent (or intelligent assistant) understands intent, adapts across languages, hands off intelligently between self-service and a human when it needs to, and improves over time based on real conversation data. One is a decision tree. The other is a system that gets better at its job.
Through Helm Engine's natural language understanding, which was built to be multilingual from the ground up rather than translated after the fact. Our multilingual AI assistants understand South Africa's eleven official spoken languages natively – including conversations that switch between two or three languages in a single sentence, which is normal here, not an edge case.
Talk to us. We'll look at your interaction volumes, your current channels (WhatsApp digital agents are usually where South African enterprises see the fastest return) and where the friction actually lives, then tell you honestly whether a pilot makes sense and what it should focus on first.
