Meet the CIO

Mohamed Sami, group chief information officer at Vodacom, says autonomous AI agents that resolve customer problems without handing them to a human are the next big shift in customer experience – and that it is closer than many think. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Sami said Vodacom’s chatbots and voice bots already handle a considerable share of customer calls, while AI tools help its human agents find information without jumping between systems. “When I say it is the next big thing, it is not something that is happening in years. It’s something that is happening very soon,” he said. How autonomous those agents become, he added, depends on how much intelligence and orchestration sits behind them. Watch the episode Sami also discusses: • Where the line falls between his role and that of the group CTO as network and IT converge; • Why Vodacom is using small language models to help large models handle isiZulu, Swahili, Amharic and Egypt’s Arabic dialects; • How a standard set of AI agents across the software development life cycle is lifting developer productivity, and why it hasn’t cost software engineers their jobs; • How Vodacom is trying to stop AI token bills running away, including orchestrators that route work between expensive, cheap and self-hosted models; • Why he told the board that cybersecurity is one of the company’s biggest risks, and the programme to rebuild core platforms designed before the generative AI era; and • What it takes to be a modern CIO, and his advice for a graduate who wants his job in 20 years. Don’t miss a great discussion on technology in telecoms. TechCentral

Shoprite CTO Chris Shortt on meeting the customer anywhere, the SAP core underneath it and hiring for a world of agents. Chris Shortt, chief technology officer at Shoprite Group, says the work of the next five years is meeting the customer at their point of need, wherever that is – and that this does not mean the end of the store. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Shortt said Africa’s largest retailer is building towards a unified experience regardless of how a customer reaches it: ordering by voice from a home assistant, or walking in to choose their own tomatoes and their own fillet. “How do we blend that for you so that it’s actually how you want to do things, as opposed to how we might want you to do things,” he said. The group’s store footprint, he added, is as alive and active as it has always been, and its point of presence in communities still makes a difference to customers. Delivering on that promise rests on a real-time inventory layer, which is why modernising Shoprite’s core SAP retail platform is the largest technology project the group has running. Shortt also discusses: • How the CIO/CTO’s job has changed, with the infrastructure now simply expected to work and the role shifting towards helping business counterparts understand the art of the possible; • Why about 12 000 Shoprite employees are using generative AI, and how the gateway the group built picks the least expensive model that can handle a request; • Why his product teams now pair one or two people with several agents, and what he put to the group’s chief people officer about recruits who arrive with agents of their own; • Why he will not comment on other retailers’ ERP failures, and the “day in the life of” testing he relies on instead; • What he tells the audit and risk committee when they ask what keeps him up at night; and • The book that shaped his thinking, and the productivity habit he will not work without. Don’t miss a great discussion on the future of retail. TechCentral

Discovery group CIO Derek Wilcocks on personalised Vitality, the limits of AI coding and why growth beats cost-cutting. Derek Wilcocks, group CIO at Discovery, says AI has finally given the group the ability to do something it has wanted to do since Vitality launched more than 25 years ago: personalise it. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Wilcocks said Personal Health Pathways is built on AI models trained on member data collected since 2000, and used only with a member’s consent. For most of Vitality’s history, the targets were identical for everyone. The programme can now suggest a walk, a glucose test or a cancer screening rather than a run. Wilcocks spent 23 years at Dimension Data, now NTT Data, where he ran Internet Solutions, served as group CIO and led the Middle East and Africa business as CEO. He was the 12th person to join Internet Solutions and founded a subsidiary that sold the first firewalls into South Africa’s banks. He joined Discovery in 2018. In the discussion, he is candid about the limits of AI in software development. Discovery is measuring efficiency gains of roughly 20-25% in some areas from AI coding tools, but developers in large corporates were spending only a quarter to a third of their time writing code to begin with. Senior developers use all the major agentic coding frameworks, though the group has spent heavily on guardrails constraining what those tools are allowed to do. Wilcocks also discusses: • Why Discovery’s health and life businesses buy no traditional enterprise software, developing everything from scratch; • Why he thinks Elon Musk is right about the direction but wrong about the timing on the end of source code, and the three problems standing in the way – explainability, efficiency and maintainability; • Why the decade in which knowing how to code was enough to walk into a job has come to an end; • How a federated model with around 14 CIOs across the group is held together by mandatory central security, privacy and ethics functions – and what happened when Discovery’s data scientists were asked to simplify the AI rules written for them; • Why he sees AI at Discovery as primarily a growth story rather than a cost-cutting one, with staff retrained and redeployed rather than cut; and • His route into computers, from a Commodore Vic-20 with 4KB of memory to the father who cured him of wanting to be an electrical engineer. Don’t miss any of the other great interviews on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO. TechCentral

Meet the CIO is brought to you by NTT DATA -- Johnson Idesoh, group chief information and technology officer at Absa, says AI in all its forms – generative, agentic and the AI now being wielded by cybercriminals – is the single biggest topic on his desk, but cautions that it remains a tool that has to be tied directly to business strategy and customer outcomes to deliver value. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Idesoh said AI is maturing rapidly into heavily regulated industries such as financial services, and that banks must use the same technology to counter adversaries who are themselves deploying it. Idesoh has held senior technology leadership roles across several large organisations, including group CIO at Old Mutual and leadership positions at insurer Aviva and pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca, before joining Absa as group CTO. In the interview, Idesoh unpacks the thinking behind Absa's R2.4-billion software impairment in its 2025 financial year – a 13-fold increase on the prior year's write-off – explaining that it was driven not by a single large asset but by more than 100 smaller ones, and reflected three things: • A fundamental shift in group strategy under new group CEO Kenny Fihla towards a Pan-African, client-led model; • A changing regulatory regime; and • The accelerating pace of technological change in AI, data and cybersecurity. He also reflects on how banking technology has evolved – from the water-cooled mainframes of the 1990s to today’s far smaller IBM z16 machines and the move towards cloud and service-based consumption – and why the real challenge is not the mainframe itself but the decades-old Cobol software paradigms still running on it. Listen to the interview Idesoh also discusses: • The noise around Anthropic’s “Mythos” model and what AI-driven vulnerability discovery means for bank cybersecurity, arguing that organisations should not panic but must become adept at using AI to find and remediate vulnerabilities at speed; • Whether such models should be released to the public immediately or to large institutions first; the impact of AI on software development jobs, and his view that the traditional junior-to-senior developer pyramid may give way to apprenticeship-style models; • How Absa is encouraging its technology talent to keep pace through leadership, early-adopter advocates and gamified celebration of new skills; • The bank’s deployment of agentic AI, including its customer-facing AI agent and an internal IT-support agent that has handled queries from 11 000 colleagues with a 90% resolution rate; and • His own path into technology, from an aspiring airline pilot who realised aircraft were becoming “flying computers” to a career that began on a BBC Micro. Don’t miss any of the other great interviews on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO. TechCentral

Anton Fatti, chief technology officer of HealthBridge, says the doctor-patient relationship must remain at the centre of digital transformation in healthcare, even as AI reshapes how medical practices operate. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Fatti said AI and cloud computing are already easing the administrative burden on doctors and medical professionals, allowing them to spend more time with patients rather than on paperwork and back-office tasks. Fatti joined Healthbridge as CTO in February 2025, bringing experience from senior technology leadership roles at the South African Revenue Service, where he served as chief technology and innovation officer, as well as at Discovery, where he was chief digital officer, and data business Lightstone, where he was CIO. Healthbridge, founded in 1999, positions itself as a technology partner that helps medical professionals run their practices so they can focus on patient care. The company’s offerings have evolved significantly since its early days – from a pre-cloud, pre-AI era to a modern cloud-based software-as-a-service platform built in partnership with Google Cloud. In the interview, Fatti discusses how the company has structured its innovation efforts. He also addresses which parts of clinical workflows are ready for AI automation today and which must remain human-led, and how far the industry is from AI playing a decisive role in diagnosis. On the shortage of medical professionals in South Africa, particularly in certain specialities, Fatti explores how AI and other modern tools can make doctors more productive – and whether practitioners are receptive to adopting them. He also shares his views on how policymakers should be thinking about AI in healthcare, the new skills emerging inside his teams and his approach to disrupting Healthbridge’s own business model before a competitor does. TechCentral

Technology sits at the heart of modern capital markets, and nowhere is that more evident than at the JSE. In the latest episode of Meet the CIO, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod sits down with Tebalo Tsoaeli, the bourse’s CIO, to unpack how technology underpins Africa’s largest stock exchange – and how it is evolving for a more digital, global and real-time future. Meet the CIO is brought to you by NTT DATA, where global experience meets local impact. Tsoaeli has spent his entire career in financial services technology, starting out as an application developer at Rand Merchant Bank before holding senior technology roles at Standard Bank, Investec, Nedbank, FirstRand and Sanlam. He became CIO of the JSE three years ago, bringing deep experience in large-scale, mission-critical systems to one of the most tightly regulated technology environments in the country. In the conversation, Tsoaeli reflects on his early exposure to computing and how a formal grounding in computer science shaped his career path. While he is clearly a technologist at heart, he explains how his role has evolved beyond pure IT delivery to focus on strategy, resilience, regulatory compliance and enabling market growth. A major theme of the discussion is the JSE’s technology stack and how it has changed over time. Tsoaeli explains how the exchange now works closely with Amazon Web Services, moving away from a purely on-premises model to leverage cloud infrastructure for scalability, resilience and performance. He also addresses the question many market participants ask: can the cloud really be trusted with mission-critical exchange workloads, especially in a world where outages at global providers can have far-reaching consequences? Latency and real-time trading are central concerns for any exchange, and Tsoaeli provides insight into how the JSE’s infrastructure supports the full trading lifecycle – from pre-market activity through live trading to post-trade clearing and settlement. He also touches on the exchange’s networking architecture and how it is designed to deliver predictable, low-latency performance for brokers and market participants. The episode also explores the JSE’s strategic technology partnership with Nasdaq. Tsoaeli explains how this relationship operates at a technology level and what it has delivered so far, including support for market modernisation and international interoperability. Closely linked to this is the modernisation of the JSE’s Broker Dealer Accounting system, a project Tsoaeli describes as critical to improving efficiency, resilience and future-readiness. Given the highly regulated nature of financial markets, security and compliance are never far from the conversation. Tsoaeli outlines how the JSE balances innovation with stringent regulatory requirements, and what this means for data protection, operational risk and trust in the market. Looking ahead, the discussion touches on cross-border capital flows, dual listings and the potential role of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning in trading and market operations – along with the risks that come with them. Finally, Tsoaeli shares his perspective on what success looks like for the JSE’s technology journey over the next three to five years, how he sees the role of the CIO evolving, and – in a lighter moment – his favourite productivity hack. TechCentral

Welcome to season 2 of Meet the CIO, TechCentral’s podcast series that dives into the minds of South Africa’s top technology leaders. Meet the CIO is brought to you by NTT DATA – where global experience meets local impact. After a highly successful first season featuring CIOs from across the corporate landscape, we’re kicking off season 2 with a conversation with Khaya Mbanga, chief information and digital officer at BDO South Africa, where he also heads the firm’s growing BDO Digital division. BDO is one of the world’s largest professional services firms, specialising in audit, tax and advisory. Headquartered in Belgium, its name comes from the three founding firms – Binder, Dijker and Otte – that merged to form the organisation. In this wide-ranging episode, Mbanga reflects on his career journey through consulting, FMCG and mining; how he first got into technology; and the evolution of the CIO role into one that now straddles digital strategy, cybersecurity, AI and organisational change. He also unpacks his passion for artificial intelligence, including his involvement in the IITPSA Special Interest Group on AI and Robotics, and offers his perspective on how AI will reshape auditing, tax and broader business functions in South Africa. From managing hallucinations in large language models to rethinking talent pipelines, Mbanga shares candid insights into both the opportunities and risks ahead. Topics covered include: • What it means to be the CIDO of BDO South Africa • Career background across consulting, FMCG and mining • His first computer and how he got into technology • Robotic process automation in the mining sector • How AI will transform auditing and tax • Dealing with the risk of AI hallucinations in data-sensitive environments • The broader impact of AI on South African business • Technology talent shortages and what skills CIOs need today • His favourite productivity hacks and tools Don’t miss this great opener to the new season of Meet the CIO. If you missed any of the interviews from season 1, you can find them all on TechCentral. TechCentral

When Nedbank realised early last year that its mammoth core banking overhaul and modernisation programme was going awry, it turned to Marijke Guest for help. Guest, CIO of Nedbank Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) and payments and a veteran of the financial services group, tells TechCentral’s Meet the CIO about how the bank realised it was headed for trouble, and what it took to get the project back on track and delivered – all in little under a year. According to Nedbank, the project was thought to be 80% complete, but when it was reassessed in January 2024, it became clear that only around 20% of the actual scope had been delivered. “Designs were incomplete,” the bank said. “Engineering practices were out of date. Key components, such as the liability rates engine, product lifecycle workflows and real-time processing, were either broken or unbuilt. The programme was years behind its intended outcomes, and the bank’s reputation was at stake.” Guest, who has worked at Nedbank for the past 25 years, tells Meet the CIO’s Duncan McLeod about: • When and why Nedbank first decided it needed to modernise its core banking systems and what the project would entail; • What’s involved in an undertaking like this, and why there’s potential for things to go wrong that could lead to huge cost overruns – as has happened at other South African banks that have embarked on similar modernisation programmes; • What Nedbank’s core banking modernisation project aimed to achieve, and why it was at risk of being derailed; • What she did to get it back on track and motivate the IT teams involved; • What it took to get everyone to start pulling in the same direction and ensure the project was delivered on time with zero reputational impact to the bank; • How she coped with the immense pressure she and her teams were under from the board and top management to get the project done right, on time and within budget; • What Nedbank can do now that it couldn’t do before, and how that positions it next to its rivals – both the traditional banks and the new digital bank challengers that have emerged in recent years; and • What CIOs who are embarking on similarly complex IT projects can learn from Nedbank’s project – including the pitfalls they should watch out for, and what areas they should be careful not to neglect. Guest was ultimately awarded Nedbank’s Chief Executive Award for her leadership of the project. No one involved in IT management should miss this fascinating discussion! TechCentral

Meet the CIO | Schalk Visser on Cell C’s big pivot Schalk Visser has worked in telecommunications for more than 20 years, first at Telkom, then at Vodacom and now at Cell C, where he has served as chief information and technology officer since 2020. Visser, an engineer, joined Cell C 13 years ago – during the tenure of former CEO Alan Knott-Craig – as an executive in the company’s programme management office, where he helped lead a renewal of its radio access network. TechCentral’s guest in the latest episode of the publication’s Meet the CIO podcast, Visser tells host Duncan McLeod about his career journey in telecoms before delving into his work in helping transform Cell C’s technology stack – with a focus on recent years as the operator moved to shut down its own radio access network in favour of partnerships with other mobile operators. In the interview, Visser chats about: • Where his interest in technology began; • His time with Telkom and Vodacom, including his experience helping build Vodacom’s network in Mozambique; • The changes that have occurred at Cell C in recent years and why they’re significant – including a look at the network partnership with MTN and Vodacom, and what that’s allowed the company to do differently; • His day-to-day role as head of technology at Cell C; • The role of technology in supporting what is essentially a technology business; • The changes he has brought to Cell C’s technology stack and why; • The recent ransomware attack – what happened, and what’s been done to address it; and • What’s exciting him about what’s coming down the line in telecoms technology. Don’t miss a great interview! TechCentral

Yosheen Padayachee, group IT director at Tsebo Solutions Group, is our guest in this episode of TechCentral’s Meet the CIO. -- Yosheen Padayachee was named as one of the top 100 most influential women in technology in 2024 and has been recognised among the Cyber 50 leaders in cybersecurity in Africa. Padayachee, who serves as group IT director at workplace management solutions company Tsebo Solutions Group, is TechCentral’s guest in this episode of Meet the CIO. Previously CIO for Africa at Momentum Metropolitan Holdings, Padayachee is pursuing a doctorate in technology innovation. She shares her story in this interview. She unpacks: • How her career pivoted from healthcare into IT and IT management; • Her career journey so far, which has included roles in the banking sector at Nedbank and FNB, and important lessons she’s learnt along the way; • The role of IT at Tsebo Solutions Group; • The big technology projects she’s currently helping lead; • Her insights on cybersecurity in modern organisations, and why security must be embedded at the foundation of all digital innovation; • The impact of AI on the ability of companies to protect themselves from cyber adversaries; and • Why gender diversity in the male-dominated technology industry is vital – and what needs to be done to encourage more young women to choose technology as a career. Don’t miss this insightful conversation. TechCentral