In third part of the feature on AI and the channel, we asked if South African or African companies are seeing value from their AI investments yet.
Werner Herbst, MD of First Distribution
Yes, but primarily in isolated use cases rather than at enterprise scale.
Where AI is applied to well-defined problems — especially automation and customer-facing processes — the benefits are clear: improved productivity, faster turnaround times, and better customer experiences.
The challenge is scaling these successes across the organisation to drive meaningful impact at a business level.
Ravi Bhat, commercial solutions and AI officer at Microsoft South Africa
Yes. The clearest value is showing up in time saved, faster execution, better customer experiences, and improved employee capacity. Publicly available customer stories show this clearly: SPAR reported 715 hours saved through Microsoft 365 Copilot, while Access Holdings reduced coding work from eight hours to two and chatbot deployment from three months to 10 days.
IDC-backed research also found that 64% of South African organisations see ROI from AI projects within 12 months, with 28% expecting four times the return for every dollar invested. The first wave of value is productivity and process improvement; the next wave is new products, services and revenue models, reinforcing that the early ROI story for AI is simple: time returned, faster execution, and better outcomes.
Barry Buck, chief technology officer at Saucecode
Yes — and we’re fortunate that AI is still cheap enough that a well-applied use case pays for itself many times over. That won’t always be true, so now is the moment to build the habit. And exactly as we’re seeing internationally, the biggest returns are going to developers and coders — they’ve made these tools a daily multiplier, not an occasional novelty.
Ebrahim Essop, senior automation solution manager at Nedbank CIA Robotics
Yes, organisations that have focused on targeted use cases with clear business outcomes are already realising value, particularly in efficiency gains, better compliance and improved customer experience. However, value is uneven and often dependent on maturity in data, processes and operating models. Risks also remain on the costs of AI and the ethical use thereof.
Othelo Vieira, technical product manager lead at Cloud On Demand
The leaders are — unambiguously. Companies that have invested in the right data foundations and chosen focused, well-scoped use cases are generating real returns: measurable reductions in fraud losses, improved conversion rates, lower call-centre costs. But they’re the minority. A large number of organisations have spent on AI tooling and experimentation without a clear pathway to business value. The gap between the leaders and the pack is widening, and it’s largely a function of rganizational readiness rather than access to technology.
Ryan Martyn, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Syntech Distribution
The short answer is no, not at scale. Some businesses are seeing real benefits, and in those cases it’s almost always where the application or project has been very clearly defined rather than a broad, open-ended rollout. We’re seeing this ourselves: we’re actively developing internal systems that use AI to optimise our own workflows, and with assisted coding tools we’ve been able to deploy new tools far faster than ever before. The businesses that will separate themselves from the pack are the ones building proper processes around AI, rather than defaulting to generic outputs pulled from generalist LLM information.
Andre Hogewoning, chief operating officer at Business AI
Business AI’s own customer experience offers an encouraging counterpoint to the global failure statistics. Companies that have successfully deployed AI into live production environments are, in most cases, seeing measurable returns on their investment.
However we must be honest with ourselves and with the market. Very few of our customers have yet reached what we would describe as at-scale AI deployment across their businesses. What we are seeing are successful, targeted deployments that are delivering real value — but the journey to enterprise-wide AI maturity is still ahead of most organisations.
Ziaad Suleman, senior vice-president and CEO at Cassava Technologies, SA and Botswana
South African and African companies are increasingly seeing value from AI, and this isn’t confined to a few early adopters experimenting at the edges. This reflects a deliberate strategy spanning entire business domains, from core infrastructure to day-to-day operations. Organisations across sectors such as financial services, telecommunications, mining and the public sector are building AI into their operations rather than treating it as a side initiative.
A key driver of this value is localisation. Companies leveraging localised cloud architectures are realising tangible benefits, including lower latency, improved operational efficiency, and enhanced data security and sovereignty. This local-first approach also means AI applications can run closer to where data is generated, reducing the cost and complexity of cross-border data transmission.
That said, realising the full financial and developmental return on these investments remains tied to the upcoming scale-up of regional compute power. As compute capacity expands across the continent, especially with the Cassava AI Factories planned across South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco, this will unlock more advanced use cases, support a broader base of companies, and strengthen the business case for AI adoption at scale.