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

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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