Microsoft's recent AI Tour, held in Sandton, was interesting for a couple of reasons. As the first major conference of the year, it showcased just how prominent AI is on the tech and business landscape.

AI dominated the tech agenda in 2025, and its influence is set to grow even further throughout this year."

Vukani Mngxati, the CEO of Microsoft South Africa, opened the conference by noting that the story of AI that you knew yesterday is not the story that you're going to get tomorrow.

''I believe that when we put AI at the center of everything that we do, the experience of our people, the experience of our customers, the experience of me and you as citizens of this nation will totally be different. Why? Because we would reimagine everything and we can fundamentally transform both business and government processes,' he enthused.

 He gave the example of legislation, noting that using AI agents would enable government to rethink how legislation is implemented, while businesses would be empowered to create entirely new workflows, making processes more efficient and reducing the need for large teams to accomplish tasks that previously required many people.

Vukani Mngxati, the CEO of Microsoft South Africa

 Accelerating Possibilities

The second reason why this year's AI tour was illuminating was because it gave a window it what AI can make possible. Not surprisingly, Microsoft highlighted the efficiency and business productivity benefits as a boon that AI can deliver.

''Right now, AI gives us a chance to multiply the possibilities. What used to take us a year to do we can now do in a couple of weeks,'' he enthused.

It was a fascinating observation, since it subtly alluded to the technology industry's greatest strength, of continuously reinventing itself and offering up new advances and innovations to come to terms with from one year to the next.

Zia Monsoor, the Corporate Vice President, Cloud & AI Platforms at Microsoft, added that AI adoption is moving more quickly than any other technology, with more than a billion people having already used AI tools, in less than three years.

However, Monsoor admitted, adoption rates vary: in the second half of 2025, diffusion reached 25% in the Global North and 14% in the Global South. That being said, he added that South Africa is progressing rapidly, now at 21%, up from 19% earlier in the year.

Both Monsoor and Mngxati stressed that there remains significant opportunity to expand access and integrate AI into daily life, from education and healthcare to business and government services.

Mngxxati enthused that at its heart, AI enables businesses to reimagine themselves and how they do business - a benefit that aligns with Microsoft's own oft stated mission of empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more through technology.

South African organizations are already leveraging AI to enhance customer experiences, improve operational efficiency, and drive new value across sectors such as finance, healthcare, and retail.

Zia Monsoor, the Corporate Vice President, Cloud & AI Platforms at Microsoft

Beyond Productivity

However, AI's use doesn't end with ramping up productivity.

Monsoor explained that while the first AI wave was all about efficiency, he believes that the next one is about innovation. This led neatly into a discussion on frontier companies - which my understanding is a nifty term for innovative, pioneering companies that make AI part of their DNA.

He explained that frontier companies integrate AI into how they work a daily basis, rather than treating AI as a separate project, going so far as to use AI to rethink entire workflows.

He provided a few examples of this in practice, noting that already SARS is using AI to streamline tax filing, MTN is leveraging AI to personalize customer interactions and detect fraud, while and Discovery is using it to provide financial recommendations to help customers manage their finances.

To support this transformation, Microsoft has developed the Frontier Success Framework. This, the company explained, offers guidance to organizations to enrich employee experiences by integrating AI into daily workflows; reinvent customer engagement through hyper-personalization and multi-channel support, redesign business processes with an AI-first approach and accelerate innovation by reducing the cost and time required to test and launch new ideas.

Monsoor stressed that central to this framework are intelligence and trust. He noted that AI must understand business context—workflows, data, and organizational knowledge—to deliver meaningful outcomes. The takeaway that I gathered from that is that it isn't enough to for AI to be intelligent, it also must be business savvy as well.

To this end, Microsoft’s IQ Layer unifies enterprise context, enabling AI to act as a true accelerator. 

The agents are coming

And then, of course, there is the issue of agents and agentic AI.

Monsoor pointed out that with rise of agents, businesses are going to be deploying 1000s of agents across your organization. But these AI agents are going to need to collaborate with people and they are going to need to collaborate with other agents.

''They need to have context. They must understand your business, because without shared context agents will become fragmented,’ he explained.

One interesting point raised is that agentic AI - or agents - will require the same thing every human employee needs in an organization; namely context and a deeper understanding of the business as a whole.

Microsoft also answered an unspoken question - whether learning and adopting AI is really worth it, by noting that Frontier companies will be able to create competitive advantage in the industries they serve, while being able to move faster, and launch new products more quickly.

Monsoor enthused that businesses will be able to ''take bigger swings because the cost of trying something new will drop dramatically.'

Brace for the breakthroughs

What this means for those of us on the receiving end is that we can expect breakthroughs, whether that is in material sciences or drug discoveries.

Admittedly, increased efficiency and the ability to spin up a company in record time is wonderful. Productivity breakthroughs, and being able to get more done in less time, is laudable. But the exciting possibilities that the AI Tour hinted at weren’t productivity related, but more of the human-related ones.

Perhaps those impossible to cure diseases will no longer be so impossible after all, and more easily attainable health and longevity will move from being a wish for someday, to one that is available to all much sooner than anticipated. That would be a story worth reading.