AI is changing who can build digital products and how quickly they can bring their ideas to life. The latest Africa MSME Pulse survey, conducted by GeoPoll found that AI adoption among micro, small and medium-sized enterprises has risen sharply, from 30% to 53% in a year, and that 46% now have a business website. As tools for building websites and applications become more accessible, the next question for entrepreneurs is how to turn what they create into a functioning business.
That transition brings its own considerations, says Kenne Loubser, founding team member and CMO of HyperDev. An application designed to sell products, take bookings or charge for a service needs more than a working interface. It needs a way to accept payments that works for the business and its customers, and integrating that functionality can introduce technical work beyond building the application itself.
Payment convenience and accessibility remain important priorities for South African businesses. Mastercard’s June 2026 SME Confidence Index found that 80% of surveyed SMEs accepted online payments, while 55% identified simple, seamless payment experiences as a growth opportunity and 51% prioritised secure payment processing.
For people building digital products with AI, these issues raise a practical question: how much additional technical work is required to move from a working application to one that can transact with customers?
“AI is changing the starting point for entrepreneurs,” says Loubser. “You no longer necessarily need a developer to turn an idea into a working application, which means more people can experiment with products and business ideas that might previously have been out of reach.
“The next consideration is what happens when you want that application to do something commercially. If you’re building a platform to sell products, take bookings or offer a paid service, payments become part of how the product works and how customers experience it. Accepting payments reliably means getting security, failed transactions and refunds right, and that is often where founders without a technical background get stuck. The challenge is making sure that the technical requirements of running a business don’t become a barrier in themselves. Building the product should be the start of the process, not the point where you discover how much more work is needed to make it commercially viable.”
Against this backdrop, HyperDev has partnered with Paystack to bring payment integration into the process of building websites and applications on its platform. Users can integrate Paystack’s payment infrastructure into the products they create, while a Stripe integration supports businesses looking to accept payments from customers across borders.
For Paystack, the partnership reflects the importance of making payment infrastructure accessible as the number of people able to build digital products expands.
“There’s an important difference between building a digital product and building a business around it. As AI makes it easier for more people to create websites and applications, we need to make sure the tools for running those businesses are just as accessible. Integrations like this help entrepreneurs move from having something they’ve built to having something customers can actually pay for,” says Thomas McKinnon, Country Lead, Paystack South Africa.
The partnership is the first in a series HyperDev is developing to expand access to digital tools for founders and small businesses across South Africa and beyond.
HyperDev is an AI application builder that enables people to describe what they want to create in plain language and turn it into a real, editable application.
