YAKUB ABDULRASHEED – Commerce in Nigeria is increasingly moving away from conventional storefronts, and into the everyday conversations between sellers and customers on WhatsApp, Instagram and other social platforms.
For Temidayo Aderibigbe, Co-founder and CEO of Abuja-based Kasi AI, that shift exposes a critical gap, that’s, millions of businesses are selling through conversations without a system capable of managing those conversations at scale.
“Commerce in Nigeria moved into the chat, and no one built the system to run it,” Aderibigbe told Techparley Africa.
His company, operated by Endogenous Technologies Ltd, is positioning Kasi as a social-commerce operating system designed to help businesses sell, fulfil orders and build lasting customer relationships without requiring owners to remain glued to their phones.
“The vendor was the system,” he said, “and that is what Kasi was built to change.”
What is Kasi AI and what does it do?
Kasi AI is designed as a social-commerce operating system rather than a conventional chatbot.
According to Aderibigbe, the distinction is important because a chatbot primarily answers questions, while Kasi is designed to manage the wider commercial process across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Telegram. Its functions are built around three words: it sells, it fulfils, it grows.”
The platform can engage customers, understand their requests, recommend products from a seller’s catalogue, negotiate prices within rules established by the business owner and close transactions.
After payment, it moves orders into fulfilment, while customers receive updates throughout until delivery. At the same time, conversations are converted into customer records, lead stages and analytics.
The company is targeting medium- and high-volume vendors, particularly businesses in food, fashion, gadgets, jewellery, skincare and beauty.
The problem Kasi AI is trying to solve
At the heart of Kasi’s proposition is the operational pressure facing small businesses that depend on social platforms for sales.
Aderibigbe described a typical vendor who simultaneously serves as salesperson, cashier, dispatch coordinator and customer-service representative, often from a single phone.
A seller with thousands of followers can receive dozens of enquiries daily, yet may not have the capacity to respond quickly enough to convert them into sales.
“When she sleeps, the business sleeps,” he said.
Kasi is intended to address this bottleneck by keeping customer conversations active beyond the owner’s availability.
The platform also tackles practical challenges including repetitive enquiries, manual bargaining, inaccurate delivery charges, payment confusion, fake payment claims, poor customer records and difficulty tracking orders.
How Kasi’s AI agents manage the sales process
Kasi’s agents are built around what the company calls a “Sales Engine”, through which customer interactions and orders are processed.
When a customer sends a message, the system can identify their intent, recognise returning customers and retrieve relevant information from the seller’s catalogue.
For price negotiations, business owners can establish a starting price, preferred price and minimum acceptable price, allowing Kasi to negotiate without crossing the predetermined floor.
The platform can also distinguish between pickup and delivery, capture a customer’s location and description, calculate distance-based delivery charges and collect order notes.
For payments, Kasi uses a Paystack checkout and automatically recognises when a transaction has cleared, eliminating the need for sellers to rely on payment screenshots. Orders then move through preparation, dispatch and delivery, with customers receiving automated updates.
Why is it important to African SMEs
For Aderibigbe, the significance of AI agents goes beyond automating customer replies. He argues that the most limited resource in many Nigerian small businesses is the owner’s attention, because one person often performs several operational roles simultaneously.
Kasi is intended to provide the speed and consistency of a larger operation while allowing the business owner to concentrate on production, sourcing and expansion.
“Kasi is not here to replace the vendor,” Aderibigbe explained. “It takes them out of the inbox so they can go back to making the product, sourcing stock and growing.”
He believes even modest productivity improvements across millions of SMEs could have broader economic implications.
The company also sees digital transaction records as a pathway towards formalisation, potentially helping businesses build verifiable histories that could support access to credit and growth capital.
Traction, trust challenge and next phase for Kasi
According to Co-founder Aderibigbe, Kasi is already live and processing real transactions, with its system capable of taking a customer from an initial WhatsApp conversation through payment and delivery.
The company has also launched a live demo shop and is running a hands-on pilot involving real vendors and customers.
Its broader product infrastructure includes a sales engine, fulfilment centre, distance-based delivery pricing, integrated payment confirmation, customer database and Kasi Market, a marketplace for discovering local sellers.
However, Aderibigbe identified trust as the company’s biggest challenge. Since a vendor’s WhatsApp account can represent their livelihood, reliability is more important than novelty.
Kasi therefore has to operate effectively across informal conversational patterns, including Pidgin, mixed languages and changing customer decisions.
Looking ahead, the company wants to become Nigeria’s default social-commerce operating system before expanding into markets such as Ghana and Kenya.
Its longer-term ambition is to build a commercial and financial layer spanning payments, logistics and transaction-based access to working capital and credit.
Talking Point
Kasi AI has identified a genuinely consequential problem, but its ambition currently appears stronger than the evidence presented for execution at scale.
Building around conversational commerce makes contextual sense for Nigerian SMEs, and integrating sales, negotiation, payment verification, fulfilment and customer records into one workflow is considerably more valuable than deploying another generic chatbot.
However, the difficult part is not automating the straightforward conversations; it is reliably handling ambiguous requests, Pidgin and multilingual exchanges, negotiations, refunds, failed deliveries, disputes, fraud and exceptional customer behaviour without damaging the merchant’s reputation.
Kasi itself acknowledges that trust and reliability are its biggest challenges. Its current pilot and live transactions demonstrate functionality, but they do not yet establish scalability, retention, profitability or superior performance across thousands of merchants.
The long-term vision around transaction data, credit and financial services is compelling but remains aspirational.
Overall, Kasi has a credible problem-solution thesis, but its real test will be whether reliability, merchant trust and unit economics can survive messy, high-volume African commerce.
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