by SAVIOUS KWINIKA
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – SOUTH African businesses are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, but many are discovering that buying the technology is considerably easier than turning it into measurable business value.
According to Senzo Mbhele, managing director of Cloud On Demand, organisations are increasingly finding themselves with completed pilots, active licences and plenty of enthusiasm, yet little to show for their investment months later.
“What we’re seeing across the market is a large number of organisations that have completed a pilot and assumed the work is done,” says Mbhele.
“But they haven’t done the harder work that actually makes AI useful, and the investment continues to underperform as a result.”
That work begins with defining a business objective and translating it into measurable outcomes, he says. It also requires data readiness, governance and, crucially, employee adoption.
“Most organisations haven’t made much progress on any of it,” Mbhele says.
“They are running fragmented pilots inside individual departments, without a coherent view of how those pilots connect to business outcomes.”
Mbhele says Cloud On Demand has experienced the challenge first-hand. Initially sceptical about AI, he ran free tools for months before investing in a licence.
The company’s broader rollout has since been slowed not by access to technology, but by the need to establish appropriate governance.
“We want to get the controls right before we scale, because rolling out broadly, losing confidence, and having to walk it back costs far more than moving carefully,” he says.
A small law firm provides an example of a more effective approach.
Rather than pursuing AI for its own sake, the firm wanted to create professional marketing material without the expense of a dedicated department.
“They started there. It worked. And it gave them a foundation to build on,” says Mbhele.
– CAJ News