Biko Today is an ML and AI-driven workforce platform that connects African students with SMEs that need help. We're building Africa's Work Gym – a place where students train on real work, and businesses gain the capacity they need to grow.
We train students in our partner centres: CPUT Engineering Building (Western Cape) and NetCampus Campuses (Century City – Cape Town, Fourways & Centurion – Gauteng, North West, and Free State).
Biko started with a simple observation: South African and African SMEs like ourselves — under our then Johannesburg-based company OCMafrica (now OtidiAfrica) — are under-resourced, and African youth are under-utilised.
The challenge becomes clearer when you try to scale and use the cheaper alternative in the talent world: students. In 2018, while delivering websites and marketing collateral for SME clients under the Absa ESD programme, we hired 30 students straight from school.
We quickly experienced what most businesses face: Students are rarely work-ready. They need training, structure, supervision, teamwork skills, and workplace behaviour like reporting and communication.
The second major insight came during the Post Office POS system project for the SABC modem rollout. Every attempt to source student talent revealed the same truth: Traditional internships are slow, manual, inaccessible, and expensive for small businesses.
In 2022, everything changed. After witnessing how ChatGPT and automation replaced a 15-person social media team with two people, we realised the world had shifted. AI wasn't a tool — it was a workforce amplifier.
That's when we revived our early concept: "The Spot" — a structured system where students could be trained, supervised, and plugged directly into real work at scale.
Our first trial came with MiWay. With the help of students who later became our co-founders (Owami Mokoena and Karabo Setlae), we gained deep insight into student challenges and SME needs.
We built Biko as a system — not just a platform. Supervised students, standardised workflows, ML and AI-driven tools, and dashboards that track tasks, quality, behaviour and growth on both sides.
We give you a flexible support team that can assist with:
All without HR, recruitment overheads, or full-time salary costs.
We give you access to real work, professional coaching, supervisor guidance, and an AI-powered environment that helps you learn by doing, build a portfolio, and become truly work-ready — while earning for your work.
as a business or a student
via an AI-assisted assessment
briefs → tasks → students → supervisors
and delivered through the platform
SMEs get support, students gain experience
Since starting Biko, we've worked with a growing network of SMEs, organisations and partners who believe in smarter ways of working and growing youth talent.
Let's explore how we can work together to create opportunities for African youth while scaling your business.