Kathy Gibson reports – If you think we’re living through the fourth Industrial Revolution you’re wrong – we are already well into the fifth iteration, says Hong-Eng Koh, global chief public services industry scientist at Huawei.
“We’re going to see a lot of collaboration between humans and AI,” he told delegates to Huawei South Africa Connect held in Sandton last week. “But we still need humans – AI is not going to take that away from us.”
Koh believes that the latest technology advances are the logical culmination of our move to a digital economy.
He outline the three stages of the digital economy: computerisation; digitalisation; and intelligence.
The first, computerisaton, took place in the 1980s and 1990s. This involved moving work from offline to online.
“So, for instance, when we spoke about a smart city, it was essentially about moving services online – nothing special.”
The move to digitalisation, saw the convergence of IT, communications and operational technologies, providing more people-centric services.
“But Huawei believes we are beyond digitalisation. We believe the future city has a brain that can think for itself,” Koh says. “In a traditional smart city, you still need to build an intelligent operation centre, and you still need humans to do a lot of activities.”
This same concept scales across verticals. Intelligent education , for instance will include hybrid learning, cloud and AI. Healthcare could move beyond the benefits offered by digitalisation to intelligent diagnostics and imaging.
Digitalisation already contributes positively to the economy, Koh adds. In the “traditional” economy, global compounded annual growth rates (CAGR) is just above 2%. In the digital economy it is more than 9%.
“With digitalisation, it is moving much, much faster. In China today, more than 50% of the GDP is from the digital economy, whereas most countries are below 20% or even 10%”
Koh cites examples of how governments and organistions are using technology to create connected cities, intelligent education, smart healthcare, digital farming and more.
A lot of new development is being driven by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), Koh adds. But, while many companies and individuals are using AI models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, few have yet started leveraging secondary training.
“If you are using ChatGPT or DeepSeek simply as a Google replacement, there is no value,” Koh says. “The true value of any large language model must be secondary training.”
This means training the model on your own data, to produce results that are unique to you or your company, he points out.
“But when you use a closed source large model, you are literally sending your internal classified data to a third-party server for training, and this creates data security and sovereignty issues. But with DeepSync, which is 100% open source, the base 760-billion parameters can be in your data centre behind your firewall for you to do the secondary training.”
The value of having an LLM behind the firewall, trained on company data means information discovery is based on real, verified data. It is also useful as an operation assistant that can check or recommend actions based on data resident on the server. The third benefit, Koh says, is in decision support, with recommendations again based on verified, company-specific data.
The countries that are already using AI productively score high in most of the indexes developed by the ITU, the GSMA, United Nations and more.
A key learning from these models, Koh says, is that future readiness is important – and it’s not so much about the technology used, but about how businesses transform themselves to stay relevant.
“You must be agile enough to transform.”
Huawei has identified eight critical success factors in the move to digitalisation and beyond:
- Vision and leadership
- Governance and structure
- Laws and regulation
- People and culture
- Security
- Sovereignty
- Data strategy
- Technology
Koh adds that organisations, cities and governments don’t have to come up with game-changing solutions on their own: Huawei has developed reference architectures that encompass cloud, connectivity and all the technology required to make a solution work.
“From there, we can offer you public cloud or private cloud. In South Africa, we have four availability zones that can offer public cloud or customers can build their own private cloud that meets strong security and sovereignty requirements.”
Huawei also provides AI development tools, with built-in security.”
Koh concludes that the journey to using AI productively takes six steps: governance; creating a digital culture; change management and skilling; building the digital services; ensuring the ecosystem is in place; and sustainability in both return on investment and environmental concerns.