Kathy Gibson reports from Huawei South Africa Connect in Sandton – Artificial intelligence (AI) is ushering in a new wave of technological, social and economic transformation – and South African businesses must get on board to reap the many benefits it offers.
This is the word from Gene Zhang, CEO of Huawei South Africa Enterprise Business, who adds that AI is emerging as the main driving force of digital and intelligent productivity across all sectors.
And the technology has improved rapidly, he adds: in the three years since ChatGPT swept on to the scene, the accuracy of AI models has increased 91,5%. At the same time, the cost of using AI has dropped by 99,3%.
“As a result, AI adoption is accelerating across industries, with 53% of enterprises already using AI,” Zhang says.
He says South Africa is creating an enabling environment to capitalise on AI, with policies such as the National Policy on Data and Cloud, the National AI Policy Framework, and the establishment of the AI Institute of South Africa laying strong groundwork.
At the industry level, Zhang says there have been numerous innovative and successful use cases such as AI-driven urban management optimisation, loss reduction in the power sector, risk control in finance, and efficiency improvements in mining.
“Looking ahead, in order to sustain positive momentum and unlock the full potential of AI, South Africa must address three key challenges: AI infrastructure, industry application, and talent and local ecosystem development,” he adds.
In terms of infrastructure, the main challenges lie in three core areas: data; computing power; and connectivity.
“Data is the fuel of intelligence,” Zhang points out. “It is projected that by 2030, the world will generate 1 Yottabyte of data annually. To put this into perspective, South Africa currently produces less than 3,5 Zettabytes, with less than 30% utilisation.
“This is largely due to the absence of unified platforms for data collection, storage, and processing.”
Meanwhile, computing power is the brain. With global demand for AI computing power expected to reach 105 ZFLOPS by 2030 — 500-times that of today – South Africa’s AI computing growth rate remains below 60%.
“And connectivity is the foundation of intelligence,” Zhang adds. “By 2030, 23% of households worldwide are expected to have 10Gbps bandwidth. However, in South Africa, only 30% of households have bandwidth above 30Mbps, while average enterprise WiFi remains around 100 Mbps.”
When it comes to industry-specific applications, AI adoption is still at the early stages. “Cloud penetration is relatively low, and AI has yet to achieve deep integration with verticals,” Zhang points out.
Talent and local innovation are key drivers for AI adoption, but South Africa currently faces a talent gap of 500 000 in ICT – 60% of this concentrated in AI, big data and cloud.
“The country’s total AI investment stands at around $500-million, but 70% comes from foreign sources,” Zhang says. “This highlights a clear need to accelerate local AI investment and development.”
He shares some key insights into how South African enterprises could respond in the face of these challenges, and how Huawei can assist.
Huawei an help industries accelerate their digital and intelligent transformation, providing reference models for achieving successful intelligent transformation.
Huawei proposes a six-layer “reference architecture”, which includes more that 200 industry solutions and four enablement models for going digital and adding intelligence.
The first is ICT infrastructure enablement, then cloud platform enablement, followed by data enablement, and concluding with AI enablement through AI capability frameworks and tools.
“In addition, Huawei’s full-stack technical capabilities in network, storage, computing, and cloud mean we are equipped to support industries in building such infrastructure,” Zhang says.
The company is also committee to building a strong local partner ecosystem. Today, it has partnerships with more than 1 400 South African companies,
“Ninety-seven percent of our enterprise business sales are conducted through local partners, and 86% of local services and deliveries are also carried out in collaboration with these partners,” Zhang points out.
Skills development is key, and Huawei provides technology-based, practice-oriented training to local partners and the next generation of professionals. It has developed and is constantly optimising 3 000 courses covering 22 technical categories. “And we are bringing these capabilities to South Africa with the goal of training over 50 000 ICT professionals in the country by 2028,” Zhang concludes.