[Column] The human advantage in the age of AI

03-11-2026
By Bob Koigi | Channel: artificial-intelligence
| Tags: Africa
Artificial Intelligence
Financial Services
Human Re

[Column] The human advantage in the age of AI

The business environment of 2026 looks nothing like it did a decade ago, as market competition and the steady integration of generative artificial intelligence are compelling leaders to ask new, harder questions about business stability and the fundamentals that enable growth.

There is a tightrope businesses must now tread as jobs and workflows evolve: to move forward in building organisational capability, each stride needs to balance people, culture and strategy to achieve sustainable growth.

The World Economic Forum estimates that 39% of workers’ core skills will change by 2030. Advances in technologies such as AI and information processing are set to be among the most transformative trends, “driving both the fastest-growing and fastest-declining roles”. As organisations navigate this shifting dynamic between human capital, workflows, and technology, the deeper question becomes how to connect AI, talent, leadership, and customer value to business strategy.

Part of the answer lies in the understanding that every business strategy is a people strategy because people are ultimately how strategy gets executed, even in today’s AI-enabled world.

Adoption appears to be geared more towards unlocking growth than replacing jobs. Four years since the introduction of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, the share of job postings requiring AI skills has reached 3%, according to the South African findings of PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer. This, according to the report, signals that AI is becoming a structural feature of hiring demand, not a cyclical one.  

However, there is an emerging gap between adoption and development: AI user roles increased by 4.2%, while developer roles declined by 8.3%. This suggests businesses are prioritising the application of AI within existing workflows to improve performance and generate value, instead of investing as heavily in building new AI capabilities.

At Absa, for example, we’ve seen the benefits of integrating enterprise agentic AI solutions to support customer relationship managers, achieving a reduction in administrative time of between 75% and 90%. Customer service response times have also improved, with early results indicating that 40% of queries are now resolved without human intervention, while maintaining the integrity of responses. We have seen a sustained reduction in service demand and 108 hours of operational time released per month in our HR shared Services.

The pattern points to a broader global shift, with organisations increasingly looking to AI as a means of improving productivity and opening new

Another hard question this raises for businesses is whether they are technically ready to deploy AI, or institutionally ready to govern it.

This is fundamentally a matter of human capital.

As work evolves, human re has an important role in helping the business determine which capabilities it needs, how roles and workflows must change, what effective leadership looks like, and how trust can be sustained through that transition

As leaders, we need to become as comfortable discussing revenue, productivity, customer value, risk, capital and growth as we are in discussing talent. Commercial leadership – that is, understanding how the organisation creates value – is inseparable from protecting our people’s trust, organisational culture, and long-term resilience.

Therein lies an opportunity to integrate the people agenda with the business agenda.

For CEOs leading that business agenda, this means mapping out the organisational capability needed, what it will enable, and what its return on investment will look like. More importantly, business leaders must be able to measure the business outcome, and not just the activity.

All of this boils down to one organising principle that sits at the crux of the matter: customer centricity.

Customers experience our organisation through our people, which means building capable, empowered, and trusted colleagues ultimately translates into better outcomes for both our customers and the business.

To succeed, businesses must be willing to learn, adapt and build capability as quickly as the landscape around them changes, ensuring that human capability becomes a driver of business performance, and not constraint on it.

Jeanett Modise is the Chief Human Capital Officer at Absa Group and Sitoyo Lopokoiyit is the Chief Executive: Absa Personal and Private Banking Pan Africa

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