This geo-spotlight features Daniel Kotton, Managing Executive for Africa. Daniel oversees QBurst’s strategic direction and delivery of digital services across the continent's diverse markets. In this interview, he discusses the practical shift toward AI integration and shares insights into a recent success, a first-of-its-kind Quality Engineering model for a major South African financial services group that has delivered a 50% increase in productivity.
How would you describe the tech scene in Africa right now? What are businesses actually spending their time and money on today?
The scene is very vibrant, but also varied, where we have mature markets, emerging ones, and those that are cutting-edge. Interestingly, countries like Kenya and Rwanda embraced AI and digital native solutions well before the West. Generally, the continent is moving steadily in line with the global pace. At the moment, the conversation is really being dominated by the Finance, Mining, Retail, and Construction sectors.
When we look at spend, the focus is on cost optimization, tech rationalization, and getting AI-ready. In this era of Cloud and AI, tech rationalization has to be the priority. You can’t modernize with a messy, expensive legacy stack. We’re seeing organizations move from heavy on-premise infrastructure towards a hybrid approach. This gives them the agility to accelerate with the help of the cloud while maintaining the stability and data sovereignty they need through their on-premise systems.
What are the biggest opportunities you see for African businesses to grow or change in the next 2–3 years?
There are two major opportunities:
- The acceleration of digital roadmaps. However, we have to be realistic about what that actually means. You simply aren’t going to accelerate if your data, architecture, and underlying infrastructure aren’t solid. By getting the structural foundation right, organizations can create a space where AI-driven development can actually take hold and work.
- This leads directly to the other big opportunity: the adoption of responsible AI and getting the human-to-machine balance right. If I’m honest, I don't think any company has perfectly cracked this code yet. With the definitive turn AI has taken, it’s no longer a bolt-on or a nice-to-have. It has to sit right at the core of the business operations. The goal is to shift high-volume, repetitive tasks over to AI to drive down the cost-to-serve, getting more out of the resources you already have while staying agile and resilient.
We’ve seen 2026 described as the "Year of Truth" for AI in Africa, with a shift from experimental AI pilots to core enterprise integration. From your vantage point, how has the conversation shifted in enterprises?
This conversation has only highlighted the importance and necessity of AI in 2026. There is still a lot of work for organisations to get an AI roadmap in place, never mind implementing it. This will be a 3-5 year journey of truth. When I say this, I'm looking at the practical hurdles. As I hinted earlier, most enterprises are sitting on legacy systems and fragmented data that aren't AI-ready yet. Core integration will be slow and measured. Most companies are naturally cautious; they would rather be slow leaders than fast adopters.
This is where a High AI-Q™ partner like QBurst has a lot of value to offer. Because we have a solid track record in data modernization and cloud-native AI integration, we are able to give cautious leaders the confidence to commit. Using our proven frameworks and accelerators, we help businesses bypass that frustrating trial-and-error phase and scale their AI ambitions safely.
Where is QBurst putting its energy in Africa right now to help businesses navigate these hurdles?
Our focus is very much on Digital and Quality Engineering (QE), especially as Data and AI start to take centre stage. If you look at the pain points businesses are dealing with today, the cost of local development in South Africa is becoming problematic, as is the shortage of the right skills. We’re able to step in and provide that capacity and flexibility at pace.
QE has always been a grudge purchase, but it has cost companies billions as it has failed to elevate quality to its rightful place in the technology and business ecosystems. We’re changing that conversation with our High AI-Q™ QE platform. We’re implementing this right now to help firms rapidly increase their maturity levels. However, we’re very clear with our clients: you can’t just drop an AI tool into a vacuum and expect it to work. It has to be supported by a proper foundation of governance, risk mitigation, tooling, and most importantly, change management.
How is our 'Testing as a Service' (TaaS) model breaking the traditional mold to offer something more scalable for a business that needs to move fast without breaking things?
We’ve moved away from a body-driven model to one that’s capability-driven. When you shift to TaaS, three major headaches usually disappear:
- End-to-end Accountability: We take full ownership of the output and quality of the release.
- Significant Cost-efficiency: We generally see the cost of testing drop by 30% to 40%, a major win in the current economic climate.
- Embedded Quality Engineering: Most importantly, quality engineering is integrated across the business and tech ecosystem from the start.
We’ve seen this work brilliantly with a prominent financial services group here in South Africa, in what is really a first-of-its-kind model for the country. We stepped in to solve the problem of fragmented testing, where different programmes and departments were all doing their own thing. By standardizing protocols across the board, we’ve managed to increase their QE productivity by 50%.
For business owners or executives overwhelmed by the disruption, what first steps do you recommend?
Speak to your clients and plan with them. Everything has to start with the person paying you. You need to understand their current friction points before you make use of any technology. Once you’ve re-anchored there, the next step is to do a focused maturity assessment. You need an honest, objective view of where the business actually stands today versus where it needs to be. We provide these assessments across all tech functions to help leaders identify exactly which levers to pull first. It’s about finding two or three high-impact use cases that will stabilize the foundation. It turns what feels like an overwhelming disruption into a manageable plan.