Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept waiting on the horizon. It’s here. And it’s moving fast. For South Africa, a country grappling with significant structural challenges but rich in ingenuity and potential, AI presents both a monumental opportunity and a real risk of being left behind.
By Junaid Kleinschmidt, intelligence lead for Accenture, Africa
The question now is not whether we’ll participate in this new world of AI – but how. More specifically, what can senior business leaders and executives do right now to ensure that South Africa not only adapts, but leads in a way that delivers real value, protects its digital foundations, and brings its people along in the transformation?
This is not a future concern – it’s a leadership imperative for today. Among the many challenges we face locally, the rise of AI is expected to further displace jobs in the coming years. While increasing numbers enter the job market annually, only a small proportion are likely to secure stable employment. Many will rely on intermittent work, while a significant number may struggle to find any opportunities at all.
While the long-term vision of AI in South Africa is essential, the real impact lies in the immediate actions leaders take now to prepare the country. That means stepping beyond theory and strategy documents and moving with urgency to implement foundational changes.
First, it starts with intent. The C-suite – across public and private sectors – must step forward and position AI as a national economic and developmental priority. This isn’t just about automation or operational efficiency. It’s about unlocking productivity across entire industries, leapfrogging development constraints, and designing inclusive, African solutions to African problems.
That means driving AI not as a tech experiment but as a business, social and public good imperative. Leaders need to ask: How can AI help us deliver better healthcare outcomes? Safer, more efficient transport systems? More responsive government services? Stronger agriculture and food security? Leading with value ensures AI isn’t simply a hype cycle – but institutionalised by design.
But no AI capability can deliver if the digital core is fragile. Too many organisations in South Africa still operate on legacy infrastructure that is slow, siloed, and insecure. As a starting point, leaders must double down on modernising their core systems – investing in scalable cloud architecture, strengthening cybersecurity frameworks, and ensuring responsible data management.
This isn’t the glamorous part of the AI story, but it’s the foundation. You can’t build AI on top of outdated platforms. And you certainly can’t protect citizens’ data or business IP without a secure, resilient digital backbone. Any serious AI agenda must go hand in hand with serious digital hygiene.
That brings us to skills – and here, the gap is more like a chasm. While the demand for “T-shaped” skills is well known, the future will increasingly call for “Star-shaped” skills – a blend of deep expertise, broad capabilities, and a growth mindset. This includes essential human skills such as resilience, agility, and empathy. In South Africa, the shortage of critical digital skills is no secret, and the rise of AI is only amplifying the need for both depth and scale in talent development. But here’s where leadership can be catalytic.
It’s not just about poaching scarce data scientists or sending a few executives to Stanford bootcamps. It’s about building pipelines – starting at the base. That means working with educational institutions to embed digital and AI literacy from the ground up, including at TVET colleges, where so much of our youth potential sits untapped. Internally, companies need to commit to large-scale reskilling programmes that help existing employees transition into future-fit roles. And government must make it easier for private enterprise to invest in human capital development through incentives and simplified partnerships.
Talent transformation isn’t only about what people need to know – it’s about how we work. AI demands a mindset shift from rigid hierarchies and linear decision-making to agile, collaborative, cross-functional teams. In the AI-native organisation, leadership doesn’t always sit at the top – it often emerges at the edge, where the data is generated, and where customers interact.
This is unfamiliar territory for many executives, but it’s critical. Leaders must redesign their organisations to support experimentation, decentralised problem-solving, and rapid feedback loops. That requires cultural change, not just systems change.
While all of this unfolds, another challenge looms – and it’s arguably the most important. As we rush to deploy AI, we must also ask: Is it fair? Is it transparent? Is it safe? Responsible AI can’t be an afterthought or a PR checkbox. For South Africa, where historical inequities still shape many of our systems, this is even more urgent. Algorithms trained on biased data will replicate – and even worsen – those biases.
That’s not just a reputational risk. It’s a societal one. Leadership must therefore prioritise governance structures that enforce explainability, equity, and accountability in every AI use case. This includes clear ethical guidelines, independent oversight, technical guardrails and mechanisms for recourse when AI gets it wrong.
The good news is we don’t have to start from scratch. There’s a growing global conversation about responsible AI, and frameworks we can adopt or adapt. But they won’t work without local leadership to contextualise and enforce them.
Executives must be vocal and visible in shaping the norms, not just following them. And this responsibility extends beyond their own organisations. Business leaders, government and academia must form coalitions that establish national standards, invest in AI safety research, and promote open dialogue on the unintended consequences of AI adoption.
None of this will happen without alignment and urgency. South Africa can’t afford siloed efforts, nor can it wait for perfect conditions. The leaders who will help this country thrive in the AI era are the ones who act now – with clarity, collaboration and a sense of national purpose. They’re the ones who see AI not as a threat to manage, but a tool to transform – if guided responsibly, built securely, and deployed in service of real human outcomes.
What the new world of AI demands from South African leadership is not just technical insight. It demands vision. The courage to modernise systems. The humility to reshape how we work. The foresight to invest in people. And the ethical backbone to ensure that what we build with AI reflects our highest values, not our worst habits. The technology is already here – about 55% of South Africans have used GenAI at least once. The question is whether we’re willing to lead boldly enough to use it well.