Gift Lubele

Gift Lubele ·

Your team is already using AI. The only question is whether you know.

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Here's a number that should be on every South African boardroom table this week.

Half.

Half of South Africans surveyed by Oliver Wyman said they bypassed their employer's AI restrictions in the past year. That's from the firm's 2026 South Africa consumer survey of 903 people, shared at a Marsh cybersecurity roundtable in Johannesburg and reported by TechCabal. And the partner who presented it, Prejlin Naidoo, said the real figure is probably higher.

So let's stop pretending. Your people are using AI. The policy that says "don't" is not a wall. It's a suggestion.

The boss is the one copying and pasting

The part that made me sit up was this: managers are more likely to break the AI rules than their teams.

Think about what a manager has on their laptop. Pricing. Payroll. Client contracts. Board notes. Now picture that pasted into a free chatbot at 11pm because a report is due in the morning.

No hacker. No breach alert. No drama. Just sensitive information quietly leaving the building through the front door, carried by someone with a corner office.

That's why Naidoo called it "an entirely new kind of threat perimeter." Your security used to stop at the firewall. Now it stops at the judgement of every person with a browser.

Banning it doesn't work. Neither does buying it.

When leaders hear numbers like this, the reflex is to block everything. I get it. It feels like control.

But the research says otherwise. Even in communications, media and tech, where staff have some of the best access to approved AI tools, 31% still use unapproved ones. Across other industries it's 34%. Giving people a licence didn't fix it. Blocking sites won't fix it either.

The same week, TechCabal ran a conversation with Lungi Sangqu, nearly four decades in tech, under a headline every CEO should frame: buying software won't fix broken processes.

That's the whole lesson. AI is not a product you install. It's a change in how work gets done. Marsh's Keletjo Chiloane said it plainly at the same roundtable: organisations need to rethink roles, responsibilities and skills, not just insert AI into old processes.

Why staff go around you

People don't bypass rules because they're villains. They do it because the work is heavy, the deadline is real, and the tool helps.

When the approved option is slow, clunky, or nobody showed them how to use it, they'll find their own. That's not rebellion. That's hustle. Africans are very good at hustle.

The skills gap makes it worse. A 2025 Kaspersky study, cited in the same report, found 72.5% of South African professionals use AI for work, but only 30% had been trained on its security risks. We've handed people a powerful tool and skipped the safety briefing.

What leading looks like

If you run a business, a department, or a government office, here is where I'd start. None of this needs a big budget.

  1. Write one page, not fifty. A simple AI policy everyone can read in five minutes: what's allowed, what's never allowed (client data, IDs, financials, passwords), and who to ask.
  2. Give people a better road. Pick approved tools that are genuinely good, set them up properly, and make them easier than the workaround.
  3. Train the top first. If managers are the biggest risk, they're the first cohort. Fifteen minutes on what not to paste beats a year of worrying.
  4. Ask for honesty about AI work. The survey found 35% of people had seen AI-generated work passed off as human work. Make it normal to say "AI drafted this, I checked it." Disclosure is a quality control.
  5. Redesign the job, not just the toolbox. Look at where your team is drowning, and redesign that workflow with AI in it, on purpose.

The bigger picture

Trust in AI is rising fast. Oliver Wyman's research shows consumer trust jumping from 11% in 2023 to 44% now, and 41% of people said they'd let an AI agent place an order for them. That's a huge opportunity for African businesses. It's also a lot more ways for things to go wrong if we're not paying attention.

And as the World Bank urges more AI investment on the continent, let's remember the investment that matters most isn't only data centres. It's people who know how to use these tools wisely.

The companies that win won't be the ones that banned AI. They'll be the ones that brought it out of the shadows, gave it rules, and taught their people to use it well.

Your team has already started. Time to lead them.

Want to roll out AI in your business without the data leaks? Let's talk through AI Solutions. Planning a leadership session on AI for your team? See Speaking.

Sources

EnquireBook