TechTides Africa

A collection of 100 posts

Fintech

OP-ED - An engineer and his team of AI agents have a quarrel with your bank card

Part three of three on Francois Rautenbach, an engineer using AI to do the work of five while making the case for a way to pay that hangs on proof rather than trust.

Entrepreneurship

OP-ED - Companies in pain pay best

Part two of three on hardware-software specialist Francois Rautenbach captures his doctrine of the willing customer and follows the trail from a coffee chat at Novell's Utah HQ to the Payment Pebble.

Career

OP-ED - He read the software off a Moon-mission computer. Now he's wary of the rush to skip the basics.

First in a three-part series on Francois Rautenbach, a South African engineer who has caught every wave of computing from Apollo-era hardware to AI coding agents, and what his career climb says about learning to build when the machine seems to write itself.

Digital Transformation

OP-ED - Big Money, done properly?

A well-travelled South African chartered accountant with an M&A background reckons he's seen what the African investment scene is missing. His fix for Big Money's blind spots? More Big Money.

Artificial Intelligence

OP-ED - The badge says "fully human"... Substack's scanner couldn't see the four AI tools I'd used.

New EU rules, a public AI detector and an invisible watermark land in a flurry.

Digital Transformation

OP-ED - China's courts already lean on AI. The lawyers are next.

A Suits actor is selling a tool upending a profession built on privileged access and scarce expertise. Law is starting to look like the early case rather than the exception.

Artificial Intelligence

OP-ED - The space race is a vanity dash. The vault is the prize.

A Chinese open-source model wiped a percentage point off the S&P 500. Three weeks earlier, the world's largest hedge fund beat every frontier model it tested with a fine-tuned Alibaba base and its own expert-labelled data. African banks and telcos should take notes.

Health Economics

OP-ED - Rug tape versus immortality. Shaking a fist at death, sensibly.

Bryan Johnson's incurable disease diagnosis triggered global glee. Meanwhile, the actuaries quantifying longer lives have landed on a $5.8 trillion case for grab bars, walking and hearing aids. Who gets to age well, and what does it actually cost?

Venture Capital

OP-ED - Two readings on the same deal... a second look at Aboyeji's big week

He said I'd misread him, then sent me the tape. He was right, from where he was standing.

Digital Transformation

OP-ED - Who gets to belong? Narrative, power, and community at Katapult Future Fest 2026

Tayo Akinyemi reports from Katapult Future Fest 2026 on narrative, belonging, and the boundaries of communities seeking to reshape how capital and technology serve people—previewing Capital for Infrastructure, her forthcoming project with Osarumen Osamuyi.

Digital Transformation

OP-ED - When "lower value human capital" meets the AI bill that costs more than people

Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters apologised for the phrase, not the thinking behind it. Meanwhile, the numbers from Microsoft, Uber and Nvidia suggest humans may have been the bargain all along.

Artificial Intelligence

OP-ED - When the AI subsidies end, the cheaper option might be human

The subsidised AI rates we are all enjoying have a sell-by date. When it arrives, the comparison between an expensive agentic system and a fully-loaded human salary may look rather different.

Venture Building

OP-ED - Are founders and funders on the same page? Notes from an unreleased PawaPay conversation.

Hindsight from someone who watched 88mph's death rate from the inside. Fundamentals focus from someone who has held PawaPay back from the fintech funding boom.

This Is Connectivity

OP-ED - AI tools are taking us somewhere no human has ever been. Just not in your voice.

A study involving Google DeepMind researchers and a festival-shortlisted short film surface two persistent anxieties in my journalism practice.

Market Intelligence

OP-ED - What really happens between "send" and "received"

A Nigerian software engineer on currency volatility, rate buffers, and why transparency beats the "zero fees" promise every time.

Artificial Intelligence

OP-ED - AI in Africa's context gap: a PwC partner, a Wits researcher and a Ghanaian founder walk into the same problem

A PwC partner says African organisations' AI tools are 'pretty useless' without clean data. A Wits computer scientist explains why. And a Ghanaian AI founder is betting he can close the gap. Part 2 of 2

Digital Transformation

OP-ED - The US$140-million (R2.4-billion) reality check

PwC’s latest Africa Cloud Business Survey says 98% of African organisations plan to expand their cloud architecture and 37% are implementing agentic AI. A sit-down with the man behind the numbers unearthed qualifications more revealing than the statistics.

Social Media

OP-ED - X marks the spot: your platform is someone else's country

Open-sourcing a candid disagreement with Future in the Humanities (FITH) Founding Chair Prof Iginio Gagliardone about Mastodon and X. What are the tradeoffs of building an African intellectual project on platforms that might extract more than they give?

Digital Transformation

OP-ED - What good navigation looks like: no machine sails itself

From Block's standing ovation to Monday.com's manifesto to a South African consultancy that started with the social system, Part 3 asks what good AI navigation actually looks like when you prioritise the human element and demand results over rhetoric.

Digital Transformation

OP-ED - The mine, the machine, and the intern

From post-WW2 coal mines to modern codebases, history suggests AI transformation will rise or fall not on technical capability alone, but on whether organisations deliberately redesign the social systems that surround the machine.

Artificial Intelligence

OP-ED - How solo sailors sleep

Solo sailors don't forecast the ocean. They set an alarm and pay attention. In the age of AI disruption, that pragmatic sensibility turns out to be rarer and more valuable than anyone is admitting.

This Is Connectivity

OP-ED - Video podcasts are just chatshows with visible microphones

Twenty-five years of podcast evolution has come full circle. Adam Wakefield argues audio's so-called limitations are actually its greatest edge in the attention economy.

Market Intelligence

OP-ED - Afrexim walked away from Fitch. Cassava's creditors can't.

Western rating agencies helped blow up the global economy, paid their fines, and kept it moving. Now they're the arbiters of African creditworthiness. But dismissing their scrutiny doesn't make the numbers disappear.

Digital Transformation

OP-ED - After the launch party: who actually benefits from AI?

What gets measured depends on who builds the scale.

Artificial Intelligence

OP-ED - Cue ominous film score: is the AI agent apocalypse upon us?

Last week, an AI startup watched its entire value proposition ship as a native feature. This is the story of what that moment reveals — and what some are betting it doesn't.