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.
A survey moon-walked into my inbox a couple of weeks ago claiming that 98% of African organisations plan to expand their cloud architecture and 37% are already implementing agentic AI. The numbers come from PwC’s 2025 Africa Cloud Business Survey. On the surface, impressive. I did however immediately suspect that they were some way from qualitative realities.
When I sat down with Mark Allderman, PwC South Africa partner and Africa cloud and digital leader, he was disarmingly frank about what his own survey can and cannot tell you. That conversation was rich enough to warrant two columns. This is the first.
On that 98%, Allderman was the first to flag how broad the term “cloud” really is. “I often try to avoid using ‘cloud’ as a blanket term,” he told me. “Is it a lift and shift of workloads, of server capacity, and old systems on infrastructure-as-a-service? Or is it more value-adding software-as-a-service (SaaS) or somewhere in the middle around implementing platforms at scale, cloud native, et cetera?”
The figure accommodates all of the above. In PwC’s 2023 edition, the number sat around 50 to 60%. “That jump was significant,” Allderman said. Sure, it reflects something real. But the nature of that something matters.
What has shifted is where the pressure to innovate originates. Cloud used to be the CIO’s problem. “In the past it was, we’ll just shift our heavy CapEx server spend into OpEx,” Allderman explained.
In practice, organisations moved their sloppy on-premise habits into cloud, left development environments running nobody was using, watched costs spike, and concluded the whole exercise was more expensive than advertised. Apparently, that era has lapsed.
Now, the pressure for strategic ‘digital transformation’ comes from business leadership. The catalyst? Yep, you guessed it, AI. Sales teams want to automate onboarding. Back-office functions want efficiency. Everyone wants access to large language models. And since those tools live in the cloud, the conversation has moved upstairs.
Andile Masuku
The survey also captured a tension Allderman finds striking: a marked gap between how bullish business leaders are about cloud versus how IT leaders feel about it. Turns out IT can see what business cannot. They know decommissioning the legacy core banking system before new platforms can deliver is going to cost serious money. Business sees AI and says we need to be in the cloud. IT is sitting there going, “Oh my goodness, guys, do you know what it’s going to take?” That’s a direct quote.
I broached sovereignty… The survey claims sovereign cloud in Africa has evolved from a compliance response to a strategic accelerator. Allderman was straight with me: in Africa, it’s still primarily a regulatory compliance matter. “We’re busy doing some work for actually two large banks, and an insurer,” he said, “and if you look at the sovereignty aspect, it is still, to be frank, around the question of "our data can't leave our borders" — their version of POPI or GDPR.”
He named NTT Data and Liquid Technologies as providers setting up local data centres to meet those requirements, with Liquid running on Microsoft Azure capability underneath. In Europe, he said, there is a genuine shift off the US hyperscalers, “obviously with issues with Trump, et cetera.” In Africa, the interest is there, but the projects are not yet reflecting in his P&L.
Andile Masuku
The survey does register geopolitical tides: 89% of respondents say they are refining their cloud strategies in response to geopolitical and regulatory shifts. Those global dynamics are now shaping African decisions, even if the projects Allderman describes remain nascent.
Notably, PwC’s own CEO survey found that 57% of organisations report their AI tools lack full access to their data and documents. Allderman did not flinch from the tension. The tools, he said, “are pretty useless and in some cases risky if you don’t have the proper data.”
So when the survey says 37% are implementing agentic AI, the ambition is real. The underlying data architecture, for most African enterprises, is still being built.
Then he went into somewhat predictable speculative territory, arguing that if you follow the logic of agentic AI platforms consuming data in structured lakes, with agents driving processes and business rules embedded in workflows, the traditional application layer starts to look redundant.
“Why do you need an application?” he asked. Your CRM, your finance system, your core banking platform: those constructs exist because they bundle a front end, business rules and data into a single package. If agents can do that work on properly structured data, the package falls away. He says he tested this provocation from the stage of a recent banking conference in Sandton. People pushed back during the session and sought him out for further debate afterwards.
It is, however, a notion that makes Absa’s recent R2.4-billion software write-off look less like an aberration and more like early arithmetic. Last week Absa Group wrote off R2.4 billion (~USD 140 million) in software for the year ended 31 December 2025. That is more than 13 times the R179 million (~USD 11 million) written off a year earlier, against R16.7 billion (~USD 972 million) in total IT spend. CTIO Johnson Idesoh attributed it to accelerating technology cycles across platforms, cloud, data, cybersecurity and AI. The assumption that you select a system and live with it for 15 years appears laid to rest in a fresh grave.
Allderman sees the Absa numbers as a signal. “I think it’s delivered a massive wake-up call,” he said. He expects more organisations to make what he called “the hard call” to stop investing in architecture that was obsolete before it delivered its anticipated value.
Andile Masuku
Meanwhile, Absa has hired Kenyan Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, the man credited with masterminding M-PESA’s super-app strategy across eight African markets, as its new chief executive of personal and private banking, effective April 1st. He is apparently the first non-South African to hold the role. Absa Group CFO Deon Raju was pointed about why: “We did not want to go and appoint a traditional retail banker.” No pressure, then.
A bank clearing billions off the books while importing fintech leadership from Safaricom has looked at what it’s built over decades and decided it’s time to clear the runway.
The PwC survey breaks FinOps maturity into five tiers. Only about one in ten African organisations have reached the top: full integration across all cloud environments.
I asked Allderman whether those numbers hold. “It’s likely a lot lower than that,” he admitted. And token usage from AI workloads, he added, is about to make this much harder. “You build an agent that is not careful around how it’s using tokens… can you imagine doing that at an industrial scale?”
In a landscape awash with adoption statistics, a consultant willing to qualify his own firm’s findings is refreshing. The real numbers, or at least the realities behind the survey data, are less sanitary than any white-paper might convey.
Next week, Part 2. The thing Allderman shared which I found most interesting was about what these forces are doing to PwC itself: to the consulting model, to the career pathways his people have relied on for decades, and to the question of what it means when the firm advising everyone else on transformation is grappling with itself.
Editorial Note: This opinion editorial was first published by Business Report on 31 March 2026.