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Many AI projects start when someone sees an impressive demonstration and asks where the technology could be used. This is usually where the conversation moves towards products before anyone has established which business problem needs attention or what a worthwhile result would look like. “The model is the easy part.

The online retailers who win Q4 are the ones who do the hard work in September. By the time November comes around, it is too late, writes Melinda Ellis van Zyl, enterprise sales lead of Shiprazor. Most South African digital retailers lock their systems down weeks before Black Friday. A code freeze means what it says: you stop changing your site and apps so nothing breaks when traffic peaks. With the annual freeze coming up in October, now is the time to review your systems and implement fixes.

The Electoral Commission of South Africa promulgated the Electoral Code of Conduct Countering Disinformation ahead of November’s local government elections. This Code is intended to enhance election integrity, promote free, fair and orderly elections. It permits lawful criticism, opinion, commentary, fair reporting, satire, parody or legitimate democratic debate insofar as these fall within the realm of protected speech.

Kathy Gibson reports from Pinnacle TechScape – The next iteration of artificial intelligence (AI) – agentic AI – is going to change the way we all work. When NASA did its Artemis II Moon flypast, it chose HP solutions to perform in rigorous and extreme conditions. “So as we say at HP – we perform from Earth to orbit,” says Nitesh Doolabh, distribution manager at HP. Another challenging environment is the Formula One circuit, where HP provides the technology for the Scuderia Ferraris team.

By Barry Buck, with Claude Opus 4.8 – Last week OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, and the AGI era was declared — mostly by people with something to sell. OpenAI’s president closed the launch briefing with “Welcome to the AGI era.” Nvidia’s CEO, whose chips trained it, announced AGI had arrived, full stop. Sam Altman, who at the start of the year dismissed AGI as not a very useful term, has reportedly been living in the singularity since July. The benchmarks are genuinely spectacular.

The Association of Comms and Technology (ACT) wants a five-year exemption from parts of the Competition Act so that six of South Africa’s largest network operators can coordinate parts of their rural infrastructure rollout. By Paul Colmer, executive member of the Wireless Access Providers’ Association (WAPA) The pitch is simple – stop duplicating infrastructure, lower the cost of deployment and reach places that remain underserved. I won’t mince my words: this is a very bad idea.

Customer self-service is not a new phenomenon; it’s just much easier than in years gone by, writes Kelvin Brown, customer operations executive at Telviva. Yet, despite this, everyone reading this will relate to being “trapped” in a seemingly never-ending loop in contact centres, pressing “1” for this, “2” for that, and when they finally, eventually, get to a human, they have to introduce themselves and their problem all over again.

The South African fibre landscape is currently dominated by noise, from the arrival of LEO satellites to infrastructure operators launching their own retail ISPs. Trevor van Zyl, CEO of Octotel, says the focus must shift from simply laying cable to solving complex, modern connectivity problems. “The industry is entering a fundamentally different phase,” says van Zyl. “The first ten years were about building a network that didn’t exist.

A migration, modernisation programme or new application may be delivered on time and still fail to produce its expected return. The difference is usually made in the months and years after launch, writes Byron Phillips, head of managed operations at Synthesis. Go-live is one of the most visible moments in any technology programme. It is easy to understand why. Months of planning, design, engineering, testing and change management converge on a single date. The platform is available.

South Africa can lead Africa in governing wireless as critical infrastructure, but first we need to face up to harsh facts: 83% is the staggering number of SA organisations that have experienced a wireless security incident in the past year alone.