Page 29 - EngineerIT Nov-Dec 2025

PRODUCTIVITY

The human factor: training and find organisations that train their staff tend to understand how the tooling
change management works. Just to start with - once you create that curiosity, people start learning
The South African market is themselves," he says.
reasonably well-tooled to make
use of AI. The widespread use of This training is critical to overcoming natural resistance. There is still a stigma
consumer tools like ChatGPT and attached to AI, often driven by a fear of job replacement. De Wit notes that in
Gemini has readied the workforce, practice, jobs are rarely replaced; instead, productive employees simply produce
meaning many employees have better quality output. "Using AI without human oversight is full of gaps, even with
already experienced the potential today’s tech," he adds.
of AI in their personal lives. The gap,
however, lies in translating this to the 2026 trends: specific context over generic data
work world. Looking toward 2026, the major trend driving ROI will be a shift from generic tools
to specific, intelligent agents. Organisations are realising that moving beyond
This is also creating a new layer of standard vendor tooling to build their own agents takes them to the next level.
risk. Employees are using personal AI
assistants to handle work tasks, and This involves training agents on an organisation's own content. This provides
unintentionally exposing confidential specific, contextual insight rather than generic data scraped from the wider
data to public models. Businesses internet.
need to manage this enthusiasm and
translate it into a secure, managed, "Organisations using generic AI tools will start adopting and building tools
work environment. specific to their content, context, and industry to ramp up capability," predicts
De Wit.
De Wit says that while companies
provide access to tools, they are As the technology matures, tools are becoming much more capable in specific
often under-invested in the training areas of expertise, such as creative asset generation. The organisations that will
and change management required succeed in the coming financial year are those that become clearer on exactly
to get a productivity benefit. "We what they want out of their AI use cases.

29 | EngineerIT November/December 2025