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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

South Africa has fewer than 400 public electric vehicle charging stations – up from zero just 15 years ago – and EV adoption remains stubbornly slow. Yet Charge, formerly known as Zero Carbon Charge, is betting big that a coast-to-coast network of off-grid, renewable-powered charging stations is exactly what’s needed to fire up the local market.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Joubert Roux, co-founder and director of Charge, joins TechCentral’s Nkosinathi Ndlovu to make the case for the company’s ambitious, R1.8-billion plan to roll out a charging station every 150km along South Africa’s national highways – and to explain why he believes the company is taking on “a timing risk, but not a business risk”.

Roux walks TechCentral through the December 2024 launch of Charge’s first site near Wolmaransstad and the unit economics underpinning the roll-out: just seven vehicles a day at each station are needed to reach Ebitda break-even. He also explains why every facility is designed to operate entirely off-grid, citing data showing that EVs charged on Eskom’s coal-heavy network emit 5.8 tonnes of carbon-dioxide a year, more than a comparable petrol car at 4.4 tonnes.

The conversation also tackles Charge’s unconventional fundraising strategy: a tokenised public offering on Mesh rather than a JSE listing, planned for June 2026. Roux argues that South Africa’s institutional capital is “extremely conservative” and that tokenisation will finally let ordinary investors into an infrastructure deal that has historically demanded R1-million minimums. The Development Bank of Southern Africa has already committed R100-million.

Roux and Ndlovu also discuss:

• How landowners hosting Charge stations receive 5% of charging revenue, and the rural economic development case that sits behind that model;

• The offtake agreement with transport aggregator Zimi covering 50% of capacity at upcoming N3 corridor sites;

• Charge’s formal objection to Sanral’s proposed policy giving it powers over businesses within 60m of national roads or 500m of interchanges, and the broader regulatory headwinds facing EV infrastructure;

• How BYD’s planned 1MW supercharger network and incumbent operators like GridCars – which already records 5 000 charge sessions a month – are reshaping the competitive landscape;

• Plans for 35MW truck-charging facilities and a long-term target of 120 stations across the national route network; and

• Roux’s prediction on when South Africa will hit its EV tipping point – and the two ingredients he says the market still needs: sub-R500 000 EVs and a genuinely reliable national charging network.

Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

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. TechCentral

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. TechCentral

AI Diagnostics, a Cape Town-based med-tech company that has built an AI-powered stethoscope designed to detect tuberculosis, recently raised R85-million in a pre-series-A funding round.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Nkosinathi Ndlovu speaks to the company’s CEO, Braden van Breda, about the funding round and its mission to transform TB screening across Africa and Asia.

The round, led by the Steele Foundation for Hope, will fund the deployment of the Ostium – an AI-powered digital stethoscope that works in tandem with the company’s proprietary AI.TB model.

The device is designed to detect signals associated with tuberculosis in lung sounds in real time, putting point-of-care diagnostic capabilities into the hands of the nurses, pharmacists and community health workers who often serve as the first contact in resource-constrained health systems.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Van Breda explains why AI Diagnostics chose to tackle one of the world’s most underfunded diseases, and how an AI model can pick up TB signals that escape even trained clinicians. He also unpacks the painstaking work of building a TB-positive lung-sound dataset from scratch.

Van Breda also delves into:

• What the Ostium compares to a traditional stethoscope;

• How the company handles real-world recording conditions, from noisy clinics to paediatric patients and HIV co-infection;

• How AI Diagnostics stops the model from silently degrading as the device moves from a Khayelitsha clinic to rural Zambia or Vietnam;

• The company’s goal of securing World Health Organisation certification and the path towards that;

• How the Ostium is positioned against – or alongside – AI-assisted chest X-ray tools such as CAD4TB and Qure.ai's qXR; and

• What it would realistically take to put an Ostium in every primary healthcare clinic on the continent by 2030.

Don't miss the discussion! TechCentral