TCS+

Companies large and small are pouring capital into AI projects, chasing the promise of efficiency, speed and scale. But as Jason Harrison, chief operating officer of The Up&Up Group, argues in this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, the upfront price tag tells only a fraction of the story – and many South African boards are signing cheques without fully understanding what they’re buying.

Harrison uses The Up&Up Group’s own experience in experimenting with and implementing AI to glean insight into the gap between the large promises by the technology (and its Silicon Valley pundits) and harsh realities of stalling projects in enterprises, especially at the integration layer.

The conversation digs into the costs that rarely make it into a chief financial officer’s spreadsheet:

• Policy and governance, Harrison argues, are not soft considerations – they are line items, often substantial ones.

• The costs of error: the reputational damage, financial exposure and legal risk when copyrighted material slips into outputs or autonomous agents go off-script.

• Agents that run amok, with companies then only discovering the problem once the cloud bill lands.

Beyond the balance sheet, Harrison flags AI’s energy footprint as a societal cost the industry is still reckoning with.

AI adoption is accelerating despite these risks and Harrison describes the current moment as a kind of nuclear arms race, driven by share-price pressure and a deep fear of being last. Much of today’s AI spend, he suggests, is Fomo (“fear of missing out”) dressed up as strategy. For tech leaders trying to make sober decisions inside a hype cycle, separating signal from noise has become a leadership skill in its own right, he says.

Suggested solutions include a “test and learn” philosophy where many small, inexpensive AI experiments are run throughout an organisation before viable instances are scaled appropriately.

Harrison cautions against one-size-fits-all deployments and argues that governance must sit close to the work rather than only in the boardroom. Quarter-to-quarter measurable objectives matter, he says, but only if they live inside a long-term strategy.

Despite his sober-minded view on AI’s high costs, Harrison still has an optimistic perspective on the technology and its potential to transform society, especially on the African continent. While the developed world is using AI to get answers, Harrison suggests African organisations may end up using it to learn how to think – a subtle but important distinction, and a timely note for any leader weighing their next AI investment.

Don't miss this discussion.

What happens to your retirement savings when you leave an employer is one of the most consequential financial decisions most South Africans will make – and one of the most commonly mishandled.

In this podcast conversation with Mpho Chitapi, 10X Investments senior investment consultant Michael Rossouw sets out what should happen, what often does, and where the costs lie.

When an employee resigns, their pension or provident fund does not automatically follow them. Money is frequently left behind in an old employer fund by default, or withdrawn in cash during the transition. The cash option is the most damaging. Rossouw cautions against it not because the money is needed less in the short term, but because removing capital interrupts compounding in a way that is extremely difficult to recover from later, even on higher future earnings.

A point Rossouw made bluntly is worth restating, because it is widely misunderstood: under the Pension Funds Act, individuals do not own pension or provident funds. Only a company can establish one, and employees are members of an employer-sponsored fund rather than owners of it. When the employment ends, the relationship with the fund changes, too.

What individuals can own are retirement annuities and preservation funds. A preservation fund is the vehicle into which an employee can transfer their accumulated retirement savings when they leave a job, taking direct control of how the money is invested and what they pay to have it managed.

That control matters. A preservation fund lets the holder choose an asset allocation aligned to their risk profile and time horizon, and integrates with a retirement annuity or a new employer fund as part of a single retirement plan. Leaving money behind in an old employer fund offers none of those advantages.

Rossouw’s sharpest warning is on fees. Even a well-structured retirement plan can be quietly undermined by costs that compound in the same way returns do – only in the wrong direction. He urged savers to interrogate the effective annual cost (EAC) of any product they sign on for. A 1.5 percentage point difference in annual fees sounds modest, but compounded over a working lifetime it can erode a meaningful share of an eventual retirement balance.

Higher fees are not always justified by better performance, Rossouw says, and savers should be especially cautious about committing to high-cost products on long contracts.

He is more measured on the role of online calculators and AI-powered tools, which have made it easier than ever for individuals to model their own retirement scenarios. The tools are useful, he says, but their inputs and assumptions need to be checked carefully – and outputs interrogated rather than accepted at face value.

The underlying message is straightforward. Retirement planning when changing jobs does not require expertise. It requires attention, an understanding of the available vehicles and a clear-eyed view of what fees will cost over time. The decision made at the point of resignation – leave it, transfer it or cash it out – is one of the most consequential a person makes for their own future self.

It is, ultimately, your money.

Vox, a well-established retail internet service provider is expanding its services to the wholesale market through aggregation.

In this episode of TechCentral’s podcast series TCS+, Andre Eksteen, senior product manager for fibre to the business at Vox, discusses the rationale behind this strategy and the services Vox is offering as “the ISP for ISPs”.

Eksteen delves into:

• The thinking behind Vox’s move into the wholesale space;

• The detail regarding Vox’s operating model as an aggregator with no physical infrastructure of its own;

• The financial benefits ISPs derive from engage via an aggregator against connecting to a wholesaler themselves;

• How aggregation services lower the operational burden on retail ISPs;

• Vox’s white-labelling service and how wholesalers benefit from it;

• The tooling Vox providers to help ISPs run their businesses more efficiently;

• How Vox balances the potential internal conflict of interest arising from it being a retail competitor to the same ISPs to which it supplies wholesale services; and

• The impact the existence of a wholesale aggregator like Vox will have on the retail ISP market.

Don’t miss it!

Everyone agrees that small and medium enterprises are the backbone of the South African economy. But the reality on the ground tells a different story – too many small businesses are still running on spreadsheets and WhatsApp, locked out of the tools that could help them compete.

In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod is joined in-studio by two members of the recently established Vodacom Business advisory board: Sannesh Beharie, managing executive of SME and mobile products at Vodacom Business, and Andrew Fulton, co-founder of data analytics firm Eighty20, a Vodacom Business partner.

Vodacom Business set up its advisory board last year to bridge the gap between enterprise-grade technology and the small businesses that need it most, bringing together tech leaders and external specialists to help companies – as well as SMEs – navigate digital transformation.

In the conversation, McLeod, Beharie and Fulton dig into what’s actually stopping small businesses from going digital, whether bundled connectivity and cloud offerings are genuinely good for SMEs or just a polite way of locking them in, and where AI fits into the picture for a 20-person business in South Africa.

They also tackle how Vodacom Business positions itself against the likes of AWS, Google and Microsoft in the SME market, where a small business owner should spend their first R10 000 a month on tech, and the most common mistakes SMEs make when they do invest in technology.

Don't miss the discussion on what a genuinely SME-first solution looks like – and whether the tech industry is guilty of designing for corporates and simply shrinking solutions down for smaller businesses.

* TCS+ episodes are sponsored by the party concerned

Most security teams can tell you what they've deployed. Far fewer can answer the board's next question: are we actually less exposed than we were three months ago?

In many organisations, the gap between security activity and real risk reduction remains stubbornly wide, even as threats become faster, more adaptive and harder to spot.

In this episode of TCS+, Clare Loveridge and Jason Oehley from Arctic Wolf unpack what the 2026 Arctic Wolf Threat Report reveals about how the risk landscape is shifting, both globally and in South Africa.

They discuss whether organisations are genuinely becoming more proactive, how AI is changing the game for attackers and defenders alike, and why familiar blockers continue to undermine even well-funded security programmes.

The conversation also explores what it means to "end cyber risk" in practical terms, why continuous improvement matters more than one-off projects, and how organisations should think about residual risk — the portion that remains even after controls are in place.

The episode closes with a look at Arctic Wolf's cybersecurity warranty in South Africa and what role warranties can play in risk management when prevention alone is not enough.