As AI adoption accelerates in South Africa, organisations need to focus on human-centricity and new approaches to leadership to be good corporate citizens in a new digital world.
So says Ashley Pillay, Chief Executive Officer at Exponant, who notes that automation, AI, generative AI and agentic AI are changing the nature of work and forcing organisations to focus on the fine balance between shareholder value and ethics.
AI adoption picks up
Pillay says: “In some sectors, AI adoption is accelerating rapidly. In fintechs and telcos, for example, we see local organisations replacing human agents with AI bots, and leveraging AI for fraud detection, risk analysis, segmenting customers and building customer engagement. In our ERP business, customers are deploying AI for use cases in logistics, supply chain and predictive maintenance.”
He says sectors like manufacturing and retail have been slower to deploy AI on a large scale, however. “Key challenges in the way of faster adoption are often a lack of skills and the investment required for AI infrastructure,” Pillay says. “You need deep pockets to set up data centres for AI, and RPA skills are in short supply in South Africa – so organisations are having to look overseas for skills.”
Pillay believes these hurdles will be overcome as hyperscalers build more data centres in South Africa and organisations focus on developing the necessary skills internally.
Keeping humans in the loop
While most organisations are keen to reap the efficiency gains AI can offer, Pillay believes they should adopt AI to enhance human capabilities and shouldn’t attempt to replace humans altogether.
“We aren't naïve – we know that AI can replace many job functions. However, it is important for organisations to be good corporate citizens and look beyond shareholder value when adopting AI. Organisations need to be responsible corporate citizens and contribute to society as a whole – and this includes creating meaningful employment.”
He points out that this is in line with a global focus on ESG in business, as well as a more human-centric approach to leadership. “Leadership has changed over the past 100 years – from a hierarchical approach to a more collaborative ‘servant leadership’ model,” he notes.
Pillay believes modern business leaders should be looking to AI to take on repetitive, time-consuming tasks and empowering employees to take on higher value jobs. “For example, we have customers using robotics and automation in manufacturing processes and who have redeployed their substantial staff complements to work in design and quality control,” he says.
He notes that skilled and experienced humans should always be kept in the loop as organisations harness more AI across their operations.
“It is important to retain human oversight over AI-driven processes,” he says. “These days, multiple tools can just write you a piece of code. But we still need to have individuals who have the technical knowledge and critical thinking abilities to ask the AI tools the right questions. They can’t just deploy or regurgitate what LLMs give you.”
Enhancing leadership
Pillay also notes that AI enhances leadership, supporting agility and insight-driven management.
“With AI, we now have empirical data and can make decisions based on facts faster, so we are able to adapt to market changes better. Harnessing AI insights effectively is becoming a crucial leadership skill,” he says. This includes understanding what outputs are possible from AI and applying critical thinking when interrogating AI, he says.
“Leaders also need to recognise the risk of AI having biases, so they need to ensure that they are fuelling their AI with an array of quality datasets to avoid risk of bias and mould the outcomes they want.”
Enabling AI adoption
Exponant is helping both private and public sector companies adopt AI in an ethical and responsible way, Pillay says.
“AI is now a tried and trusted technology, so we have beefed up our AI skills with around 70 of our 300 staff members becoming certified in various Microsoft AI tools,” he says. “We are helping our customers deploy both internally focused and external AI to refine processes and streamline workflows – and we are even using AI very successfully within our own organisation. For example, our human resourcing division is using AI to manage repetitive tasks while our skilled staff members focus on work like training and staff well-being.”
Pillay’s advice for organisations moving to harness AI is to start small, with tools they already have at their disposal. “Microsoft has invested billions in developing AI tools, so organisations using Microsoft 365 already have Copilot. This is familiar, trusted technology and organisations should start by exploring its capabilities before starting to buy or build their own AI models,” he says.
Exponant believes that technology like AI is transformative, but it should enhance, not replace, human capability, driving both innovation and purpose within modern enterprises, Pillay notes.
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