Naspers spent more than $100m (R1.64bn) investing in AI across its operations in the year to end-March.The group is treating AI investment as an operating expense embedded directly across its individual business units rather than a standalone capital expenditure. Of the total spent, OLX accounted for $30m.“From an overall group perspective … we spent at least $100m, taking all the various elements together,” Naspers CFO Nico Marais told Business Day as the technology group issued its full-year earnings report. The OLX classifieds unit, alone, has spent more than $200m on AI since 2018.Naspers boss Fabricio Bloisi is working to shift the group from being an e-commerce giant to a “global-class AI company”. At its core, the shift has seen the group going from tech investor to e-commerce operator to AI platform.For the first time in the two decades that the group has operated as primarily a tech investor, the Naspers stable is now developing and offering its own AI platforms to the market.This move means the group has had to change how it spends, requiring a different level of discipline about costs. OpenAI, which is gearing up for a big stock market flotation, recently revealed that its spend reached $34bn in 2025. Compared to the ChatGPT owner and the likes of Anthropic, Marais says the group and international unit Prosus are spending much less. “We’re not capex-heavy [on] AI investment. It is essentially going into products and services, and it’s embedded in our operations and across all our businesses,” Marais said. He said the focus is squarely on operational utility through the deployment of an internal AI model trained on consumer data, paired with agentic internal platforms such as ToqanClaw.Last week, the JSE’s largest technology group unveiled ToqanClaw, a platform that allows the company to develop its own software solutions without the need for complex technical teams or third-party developers.“We have a central AI team at the forefront of models and product development. They work closely with various business units,” said Marais.“We are developing what we call a large commerce model [LCM]. Essentially, we take AI models and train them on a significant amount of commerce data, how customers actually interact and what they’ve done on our sites … using that to profile those customers, trying to predict behaviour so that we can drive conversion, get customer acquisition cost down and drive frequency and retention on our platforms.”For now, the platform is free to use for companies in the Prosus ecosystem, including those the group owns and operates and those it has a stake in, as well as those outside.“We utilise a lot of open-source coding and models. That allows us to run these products a lot cheaper than a traditional US AI model from Anthropic or OpenAI.”Elsewhere, Naspers continues to bet big on AI, announcing a €400m (about R7.5bn) investment into European health technology provider Alan by Prosus. The group led a €480m Series G funding round for the French healthtech startup. Alan’s business is an integrated healthcare platform that brings together insurance, care and prevention “in a single, personalised experience” using AI.