Author: Andrew Bourne

South Africa’s digital divide is no longer only about whether people can get online. Increasingly, it is about whether small businesses can access technology that helps them operate more efficiently once they’re connected. This distinction matters as smartphone use has become widespread, and many township and informal businesses already use digital channels. Orders arrive through WhatsApp, and customers can make inquiries through social media. Even payments now move through banking apps. Yet these activities often sit alongside handwritten records, spreadsheets, manual invoicing, and stock systems that do not speak to one another. Although it ticks the boxes of connectivity, it…

South African organisations are no longer debating whether to adopt artificial intelligence. Across Africa, 64% of employees now report using AI at work in the past year, ahead of the 54% global average, and 76% believe generative AI improves the quality of their work according to PwC’s 2025 Africa Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey. AI has already moved from experimentation into everyday business practice. The real question, the one keeping chief information officers awake at night, is whether any of it can be trusted: whether the data behind it is .accurate, whether access is properly controlled, and whether every decision…

There is a story South Africa has been telling itself about the digital divide, and it is only half true. The dominant narrative frames the problem as one of connectivity: lay the fibre, lower data prices, extend mobile coverage, and the informal economy will follow. It is a tidy story, and not entirely wrong. However, the urgent and accurate diagnosis is this: South Africa’s digital divide is not principally a connectivity crisis. It is a complexity and cost crisis. The township entrepreneur running a spaza shop, the informal caterer operating from a Khayelitsha garage, the micro-manufacturer working in a Tembisa…

South Africa’s labour market tells two conflicting stories at once. In one, millions are locked out of work. In the other, businesses are starved of digital skills. The gap between them is where the country is losing its future. From our vantage point working with businesses across South Africa, this mismatch is not abstract. It is a daily operational constraint. South Africa is not losing talent by accident. It is building a system that fails to recognise it, fails to develop it at scale, and ultimately pushes it out. The country sits in a deeply contradictory position. The official unemployment…

The information and communication technologies (ICT), finance, and real estate sectors, while not the largest industries in South Africa, are still heavyweights in their own right. In 2021, the country’s ICT sector recorded R243.6 billion in revenue, while finance, real estate, and business services sectors contributed an estimated R1.09 trillion to the country’s GDP in 2022. In the coming years, these industries will have a pivotal role to play in South Africa’s economic development and growth, as well as the country’s ability to compete at a global level. However, a major technological bottleneck that the businesses in these sectors are facing today are modern…

How often do brands find a balance between the obvious benefits of personalisation and customer’s privacy concerns? The most effective tactics employ zero-party data to drive marketing and sales, give consumers power over how their data is used, and build transparency and privacy into every department’s operations. Zero-party data is essentially data that the customer provides intentionally. While today’s customers may be interested in personalised perks like weekly smartwatch usage reports, they will likely be turned off by recommendations that are too invasive, such as the disastrous incident where Target’s advertising algorithm revealed to a father that his teenage daughter…

It has been almost two years since the pandemic began, with the first lockdown in March 2020 forcing businesses to adopt a remote working approach. Now that South Africa is opening up, a hybrid model is quickly becoming the norm, with employees splitting their time between the office and their home. As a result, the IT department’s role has become more complicated than ever, owing to the rapid increase in remotely connected devices. Cyberattacks have, in turn, become more common. The most high-profile cyberattack happened in July, when Transnet, the state-owned railway company, was forced to shut down for a week. This attack, however, was only…

For decades, companies, especially tech providers, have followed a certain operational pattern. They start out in a major city, raise funding from investors, attract talent from nearby towns and villages, and then repeat the model in another major city as they expand. However, the events of the last 12 months have shown us that this workforce model may actually be inefficient and detrimental to the world at large, in that it’s causing talent erosion in rural communities. Youth emigration, encouraged by scarcity of choice and opportunity in remote areas, is rendering these communities unstable and helpless in the long run.…

When it comes to choosing technology providers for their businesses, CTOs and IT leaders have two options. The first is adopting a ‘best-of-breed’ approach, which involves hand-picking several disparate apps and products by different vendors, each one serving a specific need effectively. The second option is to take a ‘single vendor/integrated stack’ approach, choosing one tech provider who offers a suite of pre-integrated applications that addresses multiple business requirements in one go. Customers today increasingly prefer the second option to streamline their business processes. In a bid to cater to this demand for unified software suites, technology companies – especially…