The most reliable test of a technology company is sometimes what it is able to promise customers, but more often the extent to which it buys into its own products.
Tools that earn their place inside an organisation do so under daily pressure and repetition. Tools that fail, tend to disappear, regardless of how convincingly they are presented to the outside world.
“If you aren’t on the bandwagon of AI, you can’t be in this company,” says Vukani Mngxati, who took over as Microsoft South Africa CEO four months ago. “The business mentally has fully shifted into an AI-first company. It doesn’t matter what you do, but the question is, have you used AI to help you?”
Mngxati was speaking to Gadget during the Johannesburg leg of the Microsoft AI Tour, a global showcase of how AI transforms productivity and business operations.
As the new CEO, he says, he treats his own organisation as its most important case study.
“I’m using it, first, just to run the company. The targets where we are as a company today, where we should have been, where we should be, in terms of managing the day-to-day operational activities, are all AI driven.
“I take my financial report, put it into an AI tool, and say, what questions should I expect from my boss? Out of these numbers it tells me and I can prepare. Now I can do this in an hour, whereas before it would take a couple of days to produce intelligence to say what’s sitting in the financial report. The savings are also significant from how I can use my time better.”
Mngxati says he extends that use across routine work.
“Writing documents, summarising stuff and note taking, writing emails, responding to emails, all of that stuff. I use the tool because it’s better. If I compare what I used to do before versus what I’m doing now, more than 50% savings of my personal time I can now dedicate to other things. This is adding value, real value, from a time perspective.”
That expectation is not limited to the executive level.
“Every single Microsoft person, it doesn’t matter the role, must be AI-first, and therefore they must be skilled. We democratise skilling, which means we make it available to everybody. But obviously it’s up to each individual. Am I inquisitive enough? Am I spending time in this thing?”
He applies the same discipline to his own learning.
“Personally, I’m spending two hours a week that I carve out from a learning standpoint.”
The internal focus in South Africa mirrors a broader corporate push. Mark Chaban, corporate vice president for commercial cloud solutions at Microsoft, said in a keynote address at the Johannesburg event that the future belonged to “frontier firms” that integrated intelligent technology like AI agents. And, of course, he regards Microsoft as one of the best examples.
“The last 12 months, we’ve released more software than we did in the last three years,” he told Gadget. “GitHub Copilot (an AI-powered programming assistant) now is being used to write 37% of our source code. The diffusion within the company is happening at such a rate, at some point it’s probably going to get to 90%.”
Microsoft’s call centres symbolise the true impact of AI agents on the bottom line.
“Most customers call into Microsoft for a service incident of some kind,” he says. “We get about 75 million calls a year. When a call comes in, (we) immediately assign an agent with that human being, to triage the call, to prompt the engineer to ask the right questions, to do the right completion.
“The cost savings on just this scenario is $500-million a year. This is transforming completely how we do our call centre experiences.”
Chaban says this sparks a rethink of all internal activity.
“We gave AI to all of our employees instead of giving that GPU capacity to customers. You might think that’s a very expensive decision. But, when we did that, we saw a higher revenue per employee who had high usage of Copilot: About 9.8% on a multi billion dollar baseline.”
“We’ve hired an AI transformation officer. She’s looking through all of our business processes to figure out what are the top ten that will save us a billion dollars each.”
* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge.