Artificial intelligence has quickly moved beyond the hype stage and is taking root in just about every business process, in every vertical market.
Not since the Internet has a technology had such a profound effect, changing the way people work, live and play – and the timeframe in which it has turned the world upside down has been nothing short of breath-taking.
This brings unprecedented opportunities for the channel – along with a raft of challenges that need to be overcome to allow partners to reap the full benefit of the AI revolution.
We polled a range of business leaders from vendors, distributors, developers and end users to find out exactly where South Africa and Africa are in the AI journey; what’s next; where the channel fits in; and how to overcome challenges and seize opportunities.
The virtual panel is made up of:
Ravi Bhat, commercial solutions and AI officer at Microsoft South Africa
Werner Herbst, MD of First Distribution
Barry Buck, chief technology officer at Saucecode
Ebrahim Essop, senior automation solution manager at Nedbank CIA Robotics
Andre Hogewoning, chief operating officer at Business AI
Othelo Vieira, technical product manager lead at Cloud On Demand
Ziaad Suleman, senior vice-president and CEO at Cassava Technologies, SA and Botswana
Are we seeing real and widespread AI adoption in South African companies; and in Africa as a whole?
Barry Buck
Adoption is real, but uneven. The smaller, more agile businesses benefited first — with less governance dogma to wade through, they simply started. Enterprise has the budget for genuinely transformative results, but most haven’t yet seen the gap between buying the tools and getting the return. The capability is everywhere; the know-how isn’t.
Werner Herbst
We are seeing clear momentum, but adoption is still early and uneven.
Over the past 12–18 months, the conversation has shifted from curiosity to practical application. In South Africa, organisations are moving beyond experimentation and starting to deploy AI in targeted areas where they can see measurable value.
However, adoption at scale is still limited. Most businesses are progressing cautiously, balancing opportunity with cost, risk, and readiness.
Ravi Bhat
Yes. AI adoption in South Africa and across Africa is moving from curiosity to practical deployment. Our global AI Diffusion Q1 2026 findings show South Africa’s AI usage increased from 21.1% in H2 2025 to 23.1% in Q1 2026, ranking 46th out of 147 economies. The message is clear: momentum is building, but adoption remains uneven across sectors, company sizes, and geographies.
AI adoption in South Africa is real and accelerating but the true measure of success is whether that momentum turns into broad-based economic value. For us, the priority is turning AI momentum into measurable economic value through trusted AI, skills at scale, digital infrastructure and practical use cases that reflect Africa’s socioeconomic, linguistic and labour realities.
Ebrahim Essop
Yes, adoption is moving from experimentation to selective scaling, particularly in sectors like banking (intelligent document processing), telecoms (network management) and retail (predictive stocking). Small businesses are also leveraging AI for social media content creation.
AI tools have also advanced significantly over the last few years and will continue to do so. Globally this is the fastest adopted technology of our time, even faster adoption than the internet. While not yet universal, there is clear momentum across Africa as organisations focus on practical, value-driven AI use cases rather than broad deployments.
Ryan Martyn
At a consumer level, yes, adoption has been rapid. Huge numbers of people are experimenting with generative AI tools day to day. But that enthusiasm hasn’t translated into the same pace of adoption at a commercial level. Real world ROI for businesses in South Africa and across Africa is still limited, and most corporates are earlier in the journey than the consumer hype suggests.
Ziaad Suleman
There is a visible strategic shift from passive experimentation to active, structural alignment with AI technologies across the continent.
South Africa leads the continent in generative AI adoption, with 23,1% of the working-age population using AI tools in Q1 2026, driven by mature, localised cloud infrastructure, deep enterprise demand from our financial, telecom and retail sectors, and a globally sought-after developer talent pool.
This progress demonstrates that Africa’s AI future is promising, as businesses recognise the value of building a sovereign digital foundation for productivity and competitiveness.
Othelo Vieira
Adoption is real but uneven. South Africa leads the continent — financial services, retail, and telecoms have moved beyond pilots into production AI. Banks like Standard Bank and Absa are running AI at scale in fraud detection, credit scoring, and customer service. Across Africa broadly, adoption is concentrated in the more mature markets: Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and Morocco. The rest of the continent is still largely in early-exploration mode. So yes, it’s happening — but calling it widespread would be premature. We’re in a phase of selective, high-value deployment rather than broad-based transformation.
Andre Hogewoning
A survey by a partner of Business AI, polling approximately 150 C-Level executives, reveals that the vast majority of South African companies have yet to reach any meaningful level of AI maturity or deployment.
Only 3,2% of participating companies have completed any successful AI deployment to date; 27% currently have AI projects in progress; 63,5% are in the early stages of their AI journey; and 4,8% have not started.
These results raise important questions about the pace of real and widespread AI adoption, not only in South Africa but across the African continent as a whole.
