By Mohammed Suliman – Accenture’s 2024 report on “How Reinvention-ready Companies are Driving Growth and Relevance with Gen AI” poses a key question: Are organisations in Africa embracing Gen AI to thrive in a rapidly evolving business landscape?
We’re seeing unprecedented shifts in geopolitics, climate, and social movements, and outdated business operations won’t suffice. Across the continent our partners are calling for a digital overhaul – a cutting-edge approach exemplified by organisations they call ‘Reinvention-ready.’ These organisations harness the power of Generative AI (Gen AI) to unlock new value and reshape their futures.
According to our research, a staggering 92% of C-suite leaders recognise the urgent need to reinvent and know that Gen AI is key to achieving scale and speed. The consequences of inaction are clear: companies that fail to adopt Gen AI risk falling behind in growth, productivity, and profitability. So, what’s preventing organisations from becoming reinvention-ready? One major barrier is risk aversion – 71% of business leaders believe they need to be less cautious when scaling Gen AI use cases. While caution is important, it’s clear that inaction in the face of rapid technological change can be more harmful than taking calculated risks.
Reinvention-ready companies across Africa have embraced these risks and ripping the rewards. They excel by transforming their digital core and modernising their data foundation to seamlessly integrate Gen AI across their entire value chain – from research and development, through supply chain management, to customer service and engineering. This shift towards Intelligent Operations drives business reinvention, enabling these companies to stay relevant, scale quickly, and remain competitive. By using AI to optimise processes and rapidly expand its use cases, organisations are modernising data governance and workflows – positioning themselves ahead of slower-moving competitors.
The foundation of this holistic transformation lies in how organisations manage their data. Reinvention-ready companies adopt a domain-centric approach to data modernisation with centralised governance, ensuring every department has access to the data it needs. This provides a solid foundation for AI-driven transformation. High-speed access to quality data and collaboration between domain experts and business leaders are key drivers of this process. This feeds into adopting best practices to drive business outcomes, such as cloud-based process mining and benchmarking. By using data to identify inefficiencies and optimise operations, AI initiatives are aligned with strategic goals, driving value at every stage. Centralised data governance plays a critical role in ensuring data consistency, integrity, and accessibility. This accelerates AI model training and strengthens the overall value of AI initiatives.
Data modernisation in Africa is not just about upgrading systems—it’s about embedding data accessibility into the fabric of an organisation. This enables seamless, secure sharing across departments and functions. For AI to be truly integrated into business processes, data structures must be designed to support these technologies, ensuring they deliver consistent, actionable insights that inform decision-making and drive innovation.
Another key element of Reinvention-readiness is supporting teams and fostering talent to cope with accelerating transformation. Building an AI-savvy workforce in Africa begins with educating employees on the importance of data integrity and creating a culture of continuous learning. A key component of this people-centric approach is implementing AI literacy programmes to help employees understand the fundamentals of Gen AI – its capabilities, limitations, and risks. Businesses that invest in this education are better equipped to drive their AI initiatives and maximise their return on investment.
Crucially, breaking down silos is at the heart of Reinvention. Business leaders must embrace cross-collaborative efforts to co-create the vision for the future, ensuring that AI initiatives are aligned with business goals and seamlessly integrated into day-to-day operations. Collaboration fosters a culture of digital innovation – one where cross-functional teams work together to design solutions that optimise performance, streamline processes, and drive operational efficiency.
Innovation, powered by Gen AI, is the next leap forward for organisations across the continent striving to remain competitive. To succeed, businesses must leverage advanced technologies, optimise their processes, collaborate across silos, and embrace AI-driven insights to achieve agility, efficiency, and innovation at scale. Integrating tools like AI, automation, and data analytics into core operations creates smarter, more responsive organisations. It’s about embracing AI and learning to leverage its full potential.
Mohammed Suliman is the operations lead for Accenture, Africa