AI first code
Full delivery discipline, analysts, PMs, testers, domain-experienced developers, change control. Backed by the Innovation practice, a Microsoft Advanced Specialist Partner in AI and App Modernisation.

AI-first development, anchored in classic DevOps. Custom software, AI engineering, and AI-native delivery alongside no-code and low-code on the correct hyperscaler or private platform, whichever path is shortest to the outcome.
Activity · Develop
46% of First Digital clients already either build production solutions with no-code or AI-assisted code.
What we build
Build with code
Code-led delivery, AI-native by default, when the problem is the kind only software can answer.
Full delivery discipline, analysts, PMs, testers, domain-experienced developers, change control. Backed by the Innovation practice, a Microsoft Advanced Specialist Partner in AI and App Modernisation.
AI strategy, agents, RAG systems, ML, MLOps, built across multi-cloud and silicon stacks. A Microsoft Advanced Specialist Partner in AI and App Modernisation.
Practice
Transcript → proposal → BRS → scaffold → code → test, with every step AI-enhanced. Shorter cycles, the same accountability.
Practice
Legacy untangled, APIs surfaced, integrations made boring. Azure-native by default; on-prem where it has to be.
Build without code
If we can deliver it without writing code, we will. Faster, easier to maintain, easier for your team to take ownership of.
Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, citizen-developer-friendly, IT-governed, and connected to the systems your business already runs.
Productivity copilots in M365, plus custom copilots that know your data, your tone of voice, and your guardrails.
Long-running processes, system-to-system orchestration, and exception handling, automated without re-platforming. Cross-vendor where the Microsoft estate is not the right fit.
Employee experience, knowledge management, and learning, surfaced where people actually work.
Activity · Deploy
Test, release, ship. The bridge between the build and the run, release management, environment strategy, hand-over.
What we build
CI/CD pipelines, environment promotion, change control. Boring is the goal.
Dev, test, staging, prod, calibrated to your risk appetite and your auditors. Same shape on Azure and on the Microsoft Power Platform side.
The runbook, the alerts, the people. Whether it then runs with us (Operate) or with you is your call.
Secure coding practice with GitHub Code Security and continuous production risk monitoring with See.tech (BUI).
Practice
How we work
Framework
AI-native delivery, every step of the engagement
From Envision
Build-ready brief
with ROI attached
Stage 01
Design it for code, no-code, or agentic build
Stage 02
Build working software with the right delivery model
Stage 03
Release into production
cloud-native, auditable
To Evolve
Deploy securely and observable
AI-native software development, every step. Our APEX framework is modular, relies on cloud or private token factories, and automates the software lifecycle from discovery transcripts, to feature backlogs, to architecture, build, and delivery. Secure, quality-driven, and fast.
See the frameworkour work

Fashion Retailer
First Digital runs a major fashion retailer’s enterprise service management on Freshworks Freshservice, from Azure single sign-on to WhatsApp live chat, across roughly 1,400 agents.
Practice
Enterprise Service Management


Eurolux
A bespoke, Azure-hosted RAG chatbot called Lighty that helps Eurolux sales reps match a client’s requirement to the right products in seconds.
Practice
Modernise Apps with Azure AI

African Alliance
A company-grounded AI assistant that answers policy and procedure questions and turns messy Excel reports into consolidated management accounts.
Practice
Modernise Apps with Azure AI

First Technology
A cloud chat assistant, Harvey, that lets legal and paralegal staff check contract terms, dates and notice periods in seconds instead of digging through documents.
Practice
Modernise Apps with Azure AI

A financial services provider
A low-cost device that retrofits to home-office inverters and, with generative AI on top, gives a financial services firm a live view of agents’ backup power and battery health.
Practice
Modernising Apps with Azure AI & IoT

A custom ESP device that retrofits to thousands of basic 24V inverters, giving WFS live visibility of its remote backup-power fleet and an AI tool to interrogate the data.
Practice
IoT and Agentic Alerting


Capital Hospitals
A bespoke, five-year-battery monitoring device that watches pharmaceutical fridge temperature and humidity, and reports breaches to the right people automatically.
Practice
First Digital IoT


Frey’s Foods
Submersible LoRaWAN sensors that keep Frey’s Foods’ on-site water tanks topped up, so a plant of more than 2,000 staff never runs dry.
Practice
First Digital IoT


International Marketing Group
We moved an international marketing group’s generative-AI inference off public cloud onto our private NVIDIA GPU cluster, so their data and token generation stay local, they pay in local currency, and they run cheaper after hours.
Practice
Private AI Inference


First Technology
We gave First Technology staff local AI chat and agentic desktop agents running on our private NVIDIA GPU cluster, so the data and token generation stay local, the bill is in local currency, and responses come back fast.
Practice
Private AI Inference


Vector Gaming
Vector Gaming needed serious GPU horsepower to train a custom 350-million-parameter model for smarter game NPCs. We put our private GPU cluster behind their Vulkan-based distributed trainer and cut a two-month run down to a fraction of that.
Practice
Distributed Model Training


Urban Connect
Urban Connect’s agentic diagnostic agent works a network fault out for itself, pulling the logs, querying the routers and upstream providers, then writing the call-centre ticket, so support is proactive instead of a manual scramble.
Practice
Agentic Diagnostics


Over five years, First Digital turned Western Cape Blood Services into Africa’s first fully digital, end-to-end blood-donation ecosystem, a Microsoft-recognised, AI-powered platform that registers donors 60% faster and answers them around the clock.
Practice
Digital & App Innovation

Project Exodus
A cross-platform mobile app that brings Project Exodus’s life-recovery methodology to a potentially global audience, on both the App Store and Google Play.
Practice
Cloud-native app development

Leading Shoe Retailer
A modular, cloud-based One App that rolled out to more than 400 stores at once, pulling stock takes, sales tracking and ticketing into a single place.
Practice
Cloud-native app development

Staffwear
A full online shopping and fulfilment experience for Staffwear, built on nopCommerce and Azure and live in three months to keep sales moving through lockdown.
Practice
Cloud-native app development

A modern .NET solution that prints product labels from automated quality checks on MAHLE’s South African lines, with central configuration and full traceability.
Practice
Application modernisation

Hospital Group
A disciplined virtual team and a custom Azure DevOps blueprint that brought consistent delivery to one of South Africa’s largest hospital groups.
Practice
Azure DevOps

Leading Bank
A personalised colleague portal that lives inside Microsoft Teams, giving the bank’s staff across Africa one place to find news, company services and the people they work with.
Practice
Microsoft Viva employee experience

National Health Laboratory
A Fast-Track rollout of Microsoft 365 across the NHLS, getting a traditionally on-premises national lab service ready for secure remote work during the pandemic.
Practice
Microsoft 365 Fast-Track

An Active Directory consolidation and Exchange Online migration that brought PPC’s separate country domains and mailboxes onto a single Microsoft 365 environment.
Practice
Microsoft 365 & Exchange Online

Busamed
A custom Power Apps solution that captures patient feedback at discharge across Busamed’s hospitals, with SAP integration and live Power BI insight for managers.
Power Platform

A Power Platform system that ran Sasol’s staff Covid-19 vaccinations end to end, from consent to follow-up, built with low-code in four weeks.
Practice
Power Platform

Assupol
A low-code Nintex K2 workflow that automates policy creation from end to end, with level-based approvals, reminders and escalations, across Assupol’s business systems.
Practice
Nintex Process Automation


International petrochemical
A Nintex K2 and ServiceNow integration that gave a petrochemical company a full audit trail of every change from development to production.
Practice
Nintex Process Automation


A logistics provider
A structured ESB rationalisation that untangled a logistics provider’s organically grown BizTalk estate, cutting duplication and technical debt while keeping the business running.
Practice
Application Innovation

Global Agri & Supply
A low-code OutSystems platform that digitised complex multi-geography logistics workflows end to end, giving field and office users one governed system for web and mobile.
Practice
OutSystems Low-Code Platform


Talksure
A secure, scalable Microsoft Fabric data warehouse on Azure that gives Talksure a single, accurate view of their data to drive decisions.
Practice
Data & AI

Belgotex
A central, modelled data warehouse that pulls Belgotex’s scattered data into one place to report from, with room to take in factory IoT data later.
Practice
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics

GroupM
An end-to-end pipeline that automates GroupM’s data gathering and reporting, so their teams spend their time on analysis instead of assembling spreadsheets.
Practice
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics

Large food to fork biz
A modern, centralised data warehouse on Azure that gave an agricultural supplier a single, trusted source of data and a way off QlikView.
Practice
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics

South African Parliament
A governed reporting pipeline and Power BI dashboards that gave Parliament trusted, timely point-of-sale insight to manage its catering division.
Practice
Power Business Decisions with Cloud Scale Analytics
Get in touch
Send us the gist of what you are trying to do. The right person from First Digital will be in touch within a working day.