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Netstar is leveraging its parent company’s AI infrastructure to gain an edge and grow in South Africa’s competitive vehicle tracking market.This, in part, helps to validate JSE-listed Altron’s investment in computing power for AI. Altron has been under pressure to expand units such as Netstar after the unbundling of Bytes Technology. Once a dominant presence in the sector, Netstar had lost ground to competitors such as Mix Telematics, which recently merged with Powerfleet, and Karooooo-owned Cartrack.Netstar is a key business and source of growth in the group’s portfolio. Netstar MD Warren Mande told Business Day that the unit is using Altron’s AI Factory, local specialised AI data centres in South Africa, to process large datasets affordably and generate predictive insights.In October 2025, Altron unveiled the country’s “first operational AI factory”, powered by Nvidia’s enterprise infrastructure.In Altron’s case, the Nvidia technology is hosted at Teraco, South Africa’s largest data centre provider. At launch, the group had customers already making use of the platform, including Dataviue, Lelapa AI and MathU.As a base, Altron has made Nvidia’s “AI marketplace” available to local customers. Companies choose which model they want and for what purpose, then Altron’s professionals help deploy or customise it in the business. That same computing power is also being used to improve Altron’s own operations. “We’ve essentially built our own AI data centres. We’ve got two of them in South Africa, meaning we have got failovers. We’re running our own models, highly secured … we can leverage the insights that AI can provide at a very competitive cost,” said Mande.While many organisations are starting to use AI in their operations, it comes at a cost. The rising IT costs are now raising questions about the wisdom of replacing humans with AI, with one type of cost simply being replaced by another. For Netstar, processing high-volume workloads locally avoids the high fees associated with third-party cloud providers like Microsoft, Google or Amazon.Internally, Netstar ingests about 180-billion data points a month from vehicles across its network, while also drawing on 30 years of telematics history, with more than 60-billion kilometres tracked.Rather than sifting through thousands of raw telematics signals manually, AI models detect deviations from routine driver patterns to proactively alert vehicle owners or fleet managers before incidents occur.“If we see people are driving off a route and it’s going to an area that they shouldn’t be driving on, we can call them, or we can WhatsApp them and say, ‘Hey, is everything okay? Do you know your car’s driving out of your traditional pattern?’” said Mande.The business receives about 83,000 inbound signals managed by 96 agents across three shifts. Through AI, it aims to automate up to 80% of these manual, repetitive tasks in a short time.“We’re going to be able to automate that … in the space of like 60 days. We don’t see AI as replacing people; AI is going to displace jobs where there is repetitive human manual work.“This allows staff to be redeployed into value-adding roles like customer success management,” Mande said.“Automate as much of your work as you can because we want you to come and help us do the things that the AI can’t do.”Business Day
