The author, the JSE’s Alicia Greenwood Adopting AI has proved considerably easier than turning it into measurable enterprise value. McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey found that 80% of respondents believe AI has improved their individual productivity, but only 37% report any impact from AI on earnings before interest and tax. Organisations have moved quickly…
Customers who give an AI agent their banking login could carry the loss if something goes wrong, Absa has warned, as South African banks join their US rivals in keeping outside AI agents away from customer accounts. FNB, Discovery Bank and Capitec say they don’t allow third-party AI agents into customer accounts. Absa strongly discourages…
Dr Andile Ngcaba, executive chairman and co-founder of Convergence Partners and Solcon Capital. (Photograph by Strike a Pose) Artificial intelligence (AI) agents could outnumber humans operating on the internet within the next two to three years, as rapid innovation forces businesses and governments to rethink how they approach the emerging technology. This is according to…
According to Gartner, more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled before the end of next year. One of the main reasons, says the research house, is unclear business value. Organisations are deploying autonomous systems because of FOMO and without defining measurable outcomes. If anything, agents get pointed at whatever is loudest in…
At its annual DevDay conference in San Francisco, OpenAI announced the launch of “Dots,” a new category of proactive, always-on artificial intelligence agents engineered to perform complex, multi-step tasks continuously with minimal human supervision. Designed to operate in the background across cloud virtual machines, web browsers, and local desktop environments, Dots mark a major push…
Orange Cyberdefense’s Dominic White The global reaction when OpenAI’s agents escaped a test environment and broke into Hugging Face’s systems in July was that the machines had become frighteningly capable. Dominic White’s reaction was that OpenAI’s security was frighteningly poor. His critique comes as OpenAI deals with yet another escape. On 25 September, the company…
Nvidia is rolling out a new software platform to allow AI developers to set safeguards for agents and prevent them from breaking out of containment. The release on Monday of Nvidia’s Open Agent Safety Platform comes after companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google disclosed recent incidents in which their artificial intelligence models escaped their…
When OpenAI’s models broke out of a test environment in July and hacked into Hugging Face’s systems to find the answers to a cybersecurity benchmark, it was read as a frontier lab problem: exotic models, reduced guardrails, an experiment that got away from its handlers. Adam Ely, GM of AI security at Check Point Software…
Shoprite Group chief technology officer Chris Shortt About 12 000 Shoprite Group employees are using generative AI tools, and the retailer has built its own platform to route their requests to whichever model can handle them most effectively and cheaply. Chris Shortt, group chief technology officer at Africa’s largest retailer, told TechCentral’s Meet the CIO…
The man at the heart of a lawsuit brought by 9/11 families had extensive links to Saudi government officials and went paintballing with one of al-Qaeda’s future leaders, video obtained by the BBC reveals. The new evidence undermines Omar al-Bayoumi’s 25 years of denials that he was an extremist and a Saudi spy. The videos…
