Kathy Gibson reports – Artificial intelligence (AI) will help to level the playing field, across all industries.
“We see it impacting all businesses across all solution domains,” says Ayanda Ngcebetsha, chief data officer of Microsoft, opening Microsoft’s AI A New Era event in Sandton today.
“We have to take every person with us on this journey, regardless of their skills level,” he adds.
Kalane Rampai, CEO of Microsoft SA, agrees that AI is the defining technology of our time. “And it is rapidly gaining traction in our country.”
Keynoting the event, Lilian Barnard, president of Microsoft Africa, says there is massive opportunity for AI across the continent.
“We are excited about the AI opportunity. Technology is grabbing headlines; it is changing fast; and large language models (LLMs) are accelerating transformation.”
Similar to the rest of the world, Africa is at an inflexion point, Barnard says. “AI is changing things every day, and will shape everything we do. It is truly the most defining technology of or time.
“We are excited and optimistic, because it brings hope to Africa. In health, education, sustainability and more it will help to solve challenges.
“We believe this technology can give us an upward trajectory when it comes to the African economy. In fact, analysts predict we can increase the African economy by 50% if we capture just 10% of the global AI market.”
This begs the question: how ready is Africa for the AI opportunity, Barnard adds.
‘We have high levels of unemployment, but blessed with a youthful population.
“We have a lack of connectivity and lack of digital or tech skills. But, despite these challenges we see investment in cloud technology across the continent, and organisations infuse these technologies into their business processes.”
She says Microsoft focuses its AI efforts in four areas: providing infrastructure; skilling and capacity building; focusing on SMEs; and supporting starting. “These lay the foundation for AI acceleration.”
In many ways, Africa can use AI to leapfrog technology, and address some of our biggest challenges, Barnard adds.
Some of Microsoft’s customers are already using AI in a number of use cases.
Investec has developed its ZebraGPT generative AI (GenAI) tool that has been made available to 9 000 employees.
Employees are using it as a go-to tool for knowledge and learning, Barnard says, and to develop first draft for digital marketing and business plans.
eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality is using and intelligent platform to manage water resources, getting notifications about water interruptions, providing better quality water, and ensuring general availability of water. Meanwhile, a realtime dashboard helps them show up better with communities and build trust,
Legal Interact has launched a chatbot called Robin that uses GenAI to democratise legal advice and support to all South Africans. In August, it handled 19 000 queries, giving people access to basic legal resources.
Multichoice has used AI to do speech captioning, reducing the time to do it by 30%, with 80% accuracy.