Key Findings
- 1SA CIO Council survey of 82 large employers shows 61% now have production GenAI deployments. Here's where the ROI is landing — and where it isn't.
Overview
The SA CIO Council's Enterprise AI Adoption Survey (May 2026, n=82) puts production GenAI deployment at 61% of large SA employers, up from 22% a year earlier.
"Where it isn't Enterprise coding copilots show a 6–9% throughput gain, well below the 30–40% marketing claims from vendors."
Digital-native businesses in SA achieve 4.2x faster time-to-market and 68% lower unit costs than legacy competitors.
The digital divide is no longer a technology gap — it's a survival gap.
Where the ROI is landing
Customer-service copilots (call-centre summarisation, ticket triage) deliver the clearest payback: average handle-time down 24%, first-contact-resolution up 11ppt across 14 self-reporting employers (SA CIO Council, May 2026). Standard Bank, Discovery, Vodacom and MTN all disclose material call-centre productivity gains in their 2025 integrated reports.
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