In the inaugural episode of Between The Seams, Stitch CTO Priyen Pillay is joined by Ashley Martin, CTO of Superbalist, to explore what it means to build a future-proof tech stack in the age of AI.

While many are still experimenting with chatbots, Ashley and Priyen dive into the deeper shift toward agentic commerce, which involves moving from prescriptive systems to flexible, autonomous environments. They discuss the “SpaceX approach” to engineering, the evolution from business intelligence to real-time operational intelligence and how to maintain a lean, elite technical team while navigating the rapid release cycles of modern LLMs.

This conversation is a masterclass in technical leadership, offering an inside look at how South Africa’s e-commerce giants are re-tooling their infrastructure to turn AI from a buzzword into a core operational engine.

Highlights

The shift to agentic AI

Why the future of retail isn't just “smarter search”, but autonomous agents that handle complex user intent.

The SpaceX engineering philosophy

How a “test-and-fail-fast” mindset applies to building retail infrastructure.

Data as the foundation

Why operational intelligence is the prerequisite for any successful AI implementation.

Human-in-the-loop

Navigating the trust gap between automated systems and human oversight.

In this episode, Stitch President and Co-founder Junaid Dadan sits down with Ashish Aggarwal, Partner at PayPal Ventures. With a portfolio of 85+ companies globally, Ashish provides a bird’s-eye view of how South Africa compares to emerging giants like India and the established markets of Europe. Together they dissect why global “one-size-fits-all” fintech models consistently hit a wall in emerging markets.

Drawing on PayPal’s global vantage point, Ashish explains why the next decade of South African fintech won’t be won by flashy consumer apps, but by the “invisible” infrastructure that bridges the local trust deficit. They dive into why BNPL is actually a data-gathering tool for financial inclusion, the shift toward agentic commerce — where AI handles user intent, and why the most successful fintechs are those that disappear into the background of a transaction. Ashish breaks down why the next wave of AI isn't just about cool interfaces — it’s about translating unstructured human intent into structured inventory data.

This conversation reveals the hyper-local realities of underwriting, why a global giant with billions can’t just “copy-paste” its way into the SA market and the move toward a truly unified commerce layer.

Highlights

The Hyper-Local Advantage

Why global “copy-paste” models struggle against locally rooted infrastructure like Stitch.

Invisible Payments

The “Uber-ization” of retail — making payments disappear into the background of the user experience.

The Trust Gap

Why the first transaction in SA is the hardest, and how “embedded trust” is replacing the traditional credit score.

The Death of the Destination App

Why consumers no longer want to go to a “fintech app” to shop, and how credit is becoming a feature, not a product.

AI as the New Storefront

How merchants are shifting their focus from SEO to “LLM discoverability”, ensuring their inventory is readable by the next generation of autonomous shopping agents.

In this episode, Stitch President Junaid Dadan sits down with Aliyah Allie, Managing Director of X, Bigly Labs (Dis-Chem Group’s innovation hub), to discuss the high-stakes digital transformation of one of South Africa’s most essential retail organisations.

Aliyah pulls back the curtain on how Dis-Chem is tackling the country’s massive healthcare accessibility gap. They move beyond the protein powder aisles to dissect the “spoeg en plak” reality of maintaining 40-year-old legacy systems while building the health center of the future. Aliyah shares deep insights into their unique nurse-led clinic model, the intricate challenge of rebuilding pharmacy software that dates back to the seventies, and why purposeful friction—or “healthy conflict”—between innovation hubs and the mothership is the only way to move at the speed of customer expectation.

From the ethics of Agentic AI in clinical settings to the simple power of “dog-fooding”, this conversation speaks to the importance of modernizsng complex, highly regulated enterprise infrastructure without losing sight of the human on the other side of the counter.