CURATED FOR ABSA GROUP TECHNOLOGY
Technology Only Matters When It Changes the Result
More than 30,000 ABSA colleagues now use AI at work every month. The results of 2027 depend on how their leaders guide them through it.
ABSA’s technology results are public and strong. A small business account now opens in thirty minutes instead of two days, and the bank’s services stayed up 99.97 per cent of the time in the first half of 2026. Thousands of staff have started building their own AI helpers for everyday tasks. Behind each of those numbers stands a person whose work is changing. Many of them carry a question they keep to themselves: if AI does this part of my job, what is left for me? Leaders who answer that question plainly keep their teams’ trust, and the next round of results depends on that trust. Mpho’s session gives leaders the argument for that conversation and the urgency to start it. Starting the conversation takes one session, but holding it every week is a skill, for leaders and for the specialists whose judgement the bank relies on. Speak So You Are Heard, ASB’s leadership communication programme, builds that skill in a cohort. Participants practise explaining a change plainly, taking the hard questions from executives and teams, and staying credible when the answer is still uncertain. They use it at work between sessions, so the results show at ninety days.
About this collection
Large technology programmes have an owner: a sponsor, a business case, a steering committee. Much of the new value at ABSA arrives in smaller steps. A credit file that took up to five days now takes four hours. A staff member builds an AI helper that saves her team an hour a day. Gains like these last only while someone owns them, checks them after ninety days, and notices when they slip. ABSA works across many African markets. A result proven in South Africa has to work again in Zambia, Kenya or Mauritius, with different customers and different regulators. Leaders decide whether a good result in one country becomes the standard method across the group. As AI spreads, the important checks sit with specialists close to the work. South African research among men in male-dominated industries found that women’s ideas still gain weight only after a senior man supports them. In a bank that depends on the judgement of its specialists, that habit costs more than fairness. Mpho Matsitse worked in ABSA’s strategy function early in his career. He has spent the fifteen years since writing technology investment cases and then answering for their results. His view is plain: value goes missing when nobody defines it, nobody owns it, and nobody leads the people who must change to capture it.
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