Three years after artificial intelligence (AI) became mainstream, companies are still preparing their systems to take advantage of the technology, says the head of NTT Data (formerly Dimension Data), one of South Africa's largest information technology (IT) companies.
Investments in AI have increased rapidly in recent years, driven by the rapid adoption and popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022.
Companies around the world are feeling the pressure to take advantage of this trend by adopting AI-powered services and software platforms to improve their operations and develop products.
NTT Data's managing executive for South Africa, Amantha Naidoo, said IT spending continues to be driven by companies preparing for AI and cybersecurity.
Many companies struggle with deeply embedded legacy architectures and undocumented source code, making it difficult to make data AI-enabled. Rapid advances in emerging technologies are also widening the gap between available talent and industry needs.
“We are in this dichotomy. As we modernize our infrastructure, we 1767889727 As a result, there can be a lack of focus on getting the basic functionality right,” Naidoo said in an interview with Business Day.
The executive, who has held the role since May, cited the fact that much of the foundational work for many organizations to prepare for the arrival of AI should have been done over the past decade with cloud computing.
We are stuck in this dichotomy. As we modernize our infrastructure, we are embracing the “new and shiny”: generative AI and 1767889727 Agent AI will arrive in 2025. As a result, the focus may not be on getting the basic functionality right.
— Amantha Naidoo, Managing Executive Officer, NTT Data South Africa
Until now, computing was primarily done on-premises on an organization's machines, but the “cloud” promised by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft was access to better processing and storage without capital expenditures. This also means digitizing records, data, process flows, and other information so that companies can take advantage of the data analysis capabilities enabled by cloud computing.
But despite the hype and apparent investments at the time, many of these “cloud migrations” and related projects remain unfinished, creating ripple effects as AI builds on their foundations.
Essentially, leaders often get distracted by the new and shiny and fail to take the long journey of modernization.
As a result, there is a strong trend to modernize traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) backbones to make them “future-proof” for AI integration, Naidoo said.
Related to this, budget allocations for cybersecurity are also increasing. He said this remains a “top priority for executives” due to the increasing frequency of global and regional security incidents, adding that it “often comes up ahead of AI.”
NTT Data's findings are in line with those of US technology giant Cisco, which recently reported that less than a fifth of South African organizations are fully prepared for AI.
According to the company's third annual AI Readiness Index, a small but consistent group of companies, the Pacesetters, outperformed their peers on every measure of AI value over a three-year period.
These leaders represent approximately 18% of organizations in South Africa and 13% of organizations worldwide.
This comes from a Cisco global survey of more than 8,000 AI leaders across 30 markets and 26 industries.
