TCS+ | Pinnacle CEO on how AI is going to transform SA business

Loading player...
Pinnacle CEO Tim Humphreys-Davies and his management team are early adopters in South Africa of generative AI tools in the workplace.
He joins TechCentral’s TCS+ to talk about the experience, and the impact the technology is likely to have on business operations.
Pinnacle, which is one of South Africa’s top ICT distributors, is testing the technology with the aim of assisting its channel partners with the shift to AI tools and deploying these in end-user organisations.
Humphreys-Davies explains what Pinnacle’s experience of generative AI has been to date, and he shares his views on the likely impact on productivity of deploying the technology.
In the discussion, he unpacks:
• Pinnacle’s objectives in using generative AI internally;
• The company’s learnings so far;
• The challenges encountered; and
• The impediments to deploying the technology effectively, including data availability issues, the skills gap, and the risk and complexity involved.
He also discusses Pinnacle’s exclusive distribution agreement with Nvidia – whose chips are fuelling the generative AI boom – and the industries which he believes will be impacted by AI to the greatest degree.
Lastly, Humphreys-Davies explores where the technology might be going, and how he sees Pinnacle using it in the years ahead.
6 Jun 2024 English South Africa Technology · Business

Other recent episodes

TCS | Frogfoot sees bigger fibre deals coming

Frogfoot plans to keep buying smaller fibre network operators in South Africa’s suburbs as the market consolidates, but CEO Shane Chorley stopped short of ruling out a sale of the business. “I’d be ignorant to say that we would ignore any offer,” Chorley said on the latest episode of the…
8 Oct 40 min

Meet the CIO | Vodacom’s Mohamed Sami on the agentic future

Mohamed Sami, group chief information officer at Vodacom, says autonomous AI agents that resolve customer problems without handing them to a human are the next big shift in customer experience – and that it is closer than many think. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you…
5 Oct 44 min

TCS | Norrsken22’s Lexi Novitske on how China is winning African tech

Chinese companies have built their position in African technology one layer at a time – first phones and telecoms equipment, then fintech and now the AI models that local start-ups build on. American private capital, meanwhile, is pulling back. Lexi Novitske, general partner at Norrsken22, thinks US investors will regret…
1 Oct 28 min

TCS | Dominic White and Adam Ely on AI agents going rogue

AI agents are no longer a thought experiment for security teams. They are breaking out of test environments, hacking real companies and, according to one of our guests, already going rogue inside large businesses. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen talks to Dominic…
29 Sep 1 hr 26 min

TCS | Octotel’s Trevor van Zyl on the fibre merger question

Octotel CEO Trevor van Zyl joins the TechCentral Show to talk about where South Africa’s fibre market goes next – including a potential merger with MetroFibre Networx. Van Zyl told TechCentral that Octotel and MetroFibre Networx are assessing a combination that would create the country’s third-largest fibre network operator, with…
16 Sep 25 min