- Sage partners with Augusta Labs to accelerate the build out of its AI Centre of Excellence
- Together, the teams will deliver AI at startup speed and global scale to help customers run higher performing businesses
- The partnership brings Sage’s high-performance ambition together with Portugal’s fast growing startup talent to deliver smarter automation and real time intelligence even faster
Johannesburg, January 2026 – Sage (FTSE: SGE), the leader in accounting, financial, HR, and payroll technology for small and mid sized businesses, today announced a global partnership with Augusta Labs, the applied AI lab that helps enterprises build and scale AI transformation. The partnership accelerates the development and delivery of Sage’s AI Centre of Excellence by embedding Augusta Labs’ applied AI engineering teams directly into Sage’s product organisation. This expands Sage’s AI and data engineering capacity and strengthens its shift toward becoming an AI first company.
Businesses now expect more from the software they rely on, including faster insights, smarter automation, and experiences that feel effortless. Delivering that level of performance depends on how quickly AI can be designed, engineered, and deployed into real workflows. McKinsey’s latest The State of AI report notes that companies capturing the most value from AI are those able to move from experimentation to production at speed and scale intelligence across their products.
To meet this rising expectation and push its own high-performance goals, Sage is growing its applied AI engineering capacity through its new partnership with Augusta Labs. With Augusta Labs’ multidisciplinary teams working directly inside Sage’s product organisation, Sage can build and deploy production ready intelligence faster, deepen automation across its solutions, and bring the benefits of AI to customers at a pace that matches how businesses operate today.
“This partnership gives Sage the startup speed we need while strengthening our internal AI and data engineering capabilities,” said Manav Thiara, SVP, Technical Fellow, Data Digital Services and Engineering, Sage. “With Augusta Labs fully embedded into our product organisation, everything we build together aligns with the Sage Platform, our AI roadmap, and the needs of our customers. This approach accelerates delivery for our AI Centre of Excellence and supports our transformation into an AI-first company.”
Scaling Applied AI Across Sage’s Global Product Ecosystem
Through this partnership, Augusta Labs’ multidisciplinary teams are working directly on key global workstreams including Sage Payroll, Sage Active, and Sage 300. Operating as an extension of Sage’s internal engineering organisation, these teams help deliver:
- Agentic workflows that automate end-to-end tasks
- High-performance data pipelines for real-time insight
- Production-ready AI features delivered at pace
By working in Portugal’s thriving startup ecosystem, these teams bring a level of agility and high-velocity engineering that strengthens Sage’s global AI delivery model. This helps Sage develop and deploy agentic and applied-AI capabilities at a pace rarely matched in the industry, while maintaining the reliability and governance expected by millions of customers. The result is faster iteration, quicker movement from prototype to production, and real value delivered to businesses far sooner than traditional development models allow.
“AI is entering its execution era, and Sage is one of the few companies positioned to realise its full value at scale, thanks to the depth of its data and the reach of its global distribution,” said Rodrigo Fernandes, Co-Founder, Augusta Labs. “By combining Sage’s platform vision and unique data assets with our applied AI expertise, we are helping create a new generation of intelligent, adaptive software for businesses everywhere. It’s an exciting step for both organisations and for the future of work.”
This integrated execution model ensures AI is built consistently across Sage’s portfolio, aligned with the Sage Platform, and embedded where customers work every day. It brings startup-level velocity to Sage’s product delivery, whilst maintaining the scale, reliability and governance expected by customers and partners.
To find out more about Sage Ai visit: sage.com/en-gb/sage-ai/
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Author: Banele Mahlangu from Burson Global on behalf of Sage.
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