South African organisations are emerging as some of the world’s most aggressive adopters of artificial intelligence (AI) inference technologies, leveraging advanced AI capabilities to drive real-time decision-making, automate operations and unlock new business opportunities.
While many global enterprises remain focused on experimenting with AI models, local businesses are increasingly shifting their attention to deploying and operationalising AI at scale – a trend that is positioning South Africa at the forefront of enterprise AI adoption.
This is according to Dean Wolson, general manager of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group Southern Africa, who spoke to ITWeb on the sidelines of the Lenovo Accelerate 2026 event, in Sandton, last week.
According to Wolson, the growing demand for AI inference infrastructure across different industries reflects a maturing market where organisations are moving beyond proof-of-concepts and seeking tangible business value from AI investments.
NVIDIA explains that inference is the process where a trained AI model generates new outputs by reasoning and making predictions on new data – classifying inputs and applying learned knowledge in real-time.
It notes that AI inference helps solve advanced application deployment challenges by bringing machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to the real world. From voice-activated AI assistants and personalised shopping recommendations, to robust fraud detection systems, inference is powering AI workloads everywhere, it adds.
Extracting real business value
For Wolson, AI inference represents the stage where organisations begin extracting real business value from their data.
“From a Lenovo point of view, AI inference is when you have had a consolidated store of information like hundreds of pieces of data stored in various places. On its own, this information does not have too much value,” he explained.
“What the inferencing side of AI talks to is taking that information and repurposing it to review or analyse it to be able to infer from that information something that a dynamic works in an organisation.”
According to Wolson, AI inference enables organisations to unlock deeper business intelligence and improve decision-making by analysing large volumes of data.
“For me, AI inference is very exciting because it helps give an organisation further insights that help in the decision-making process.
“AI inference is being able help an organisation to look at the data stores that it has and find a way to consolidate it and have an AI engine run on that data, analyse it, as well as infer from that data to get information that is relevant for the organisation.”
However, he noted that companies often face significant hurdles, including fragmented data environments, network limitations and poor data quality, warning that “you don’t want to have your AI inference engine running on data that isn’t in good a state to be used”.
Despite these challenges, Wolson believes South African businesses are among the most innovative adopters of the technology globally.
“What is probably unknown to people outside of South Africa is that South African corporates, enterprises and smaller businesses are very forward-thinking and they try to think outside the box,” he said.
“Some of the customers that we’ve worked with in the banking, manufacturing, telco and retail sectors have deployed AI inference solutions that are groundbreaking, not only from being a first for South Africa, but being a first worldwide.
“This is evidenced in our banking sector, which is one of the best in the world. You can compare it with any banking sector and you will see that ours is rock-solid and it delivers. You will also see this prevailing in the local AI space.”
Expensive tech
However, inference is an expensive technology in terms of the skills and expertise needed to run the systems, he noted.
“That may impact the ability of some South African organisations to be able to do AI inferencing. That does not mean you should embrace it in a very big way – you can start with it on smaller use cases or deploy it on a handful of people or departments and then check the ROI [return on investment] before taking it on a bigger scale.
“It’s important to be able to scale the solution over time and have the infrastructure to be able to do that. Some South African organisations have already started doing this; they are starting to investigate it and they have proof-of-concepts and are evaluating the total cost of ownership, and return on investment. They have deployed successfully into production.
“We have a number of industries making use of AI inference to great effect; we have some that are deploying it slowly and everything in between.”
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