Artificial Intelligence OP-ED - The seatbelt sign is on. Assume the brace position. Tavus says nearly half the people who video-called its new Griffin model came away believing they'd spoken to a real person, and that it can clone a voice from 10 seconds of audio. It's time to agree a safe word with your family.
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.
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 - 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.
This Is Connectivity OP-ED - AI is dismantling consulting's oligopoly. If McKinsey's using ChatGPT, what are you paying for? Ten years ago, a social media agency owner told me my consulting ambitions were naive delusions. He wasn't entirely wrong. But neither of us saw what was coming.
Career OP-ED - When AI comes for your craft: a personal reckoning in Africa's creative scene AI is disrupting African creative work—and it’s personal. Andile Masuku confronts hard truths about his own voiceover career and what comes next for creatives all over the continent.
HealthTech #TechTidesTuesday Lite - AI isn’t just automating work, it’s raising the stakes Off the cuff...
