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  1. TCS | Charge’s R1.8-billion bet on an off-grid EV future

    18 MAY

    TCS | Charge’s R1.8-billion bet on an off-grid EV future

    South Africa has fewer than 400 public electric vehicle charging stations – up from zero just 15 years ago – and EV adoption remains stubbornly slow. Yet Charge, formerly known as Zero Carbon Charge, is betting big that a coast-to-coast network of off-grid, renewable-powered charging stations is exactly what’s needed to fire up the local market. In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Joubert Roux, co-founder and director of Charge, joins TechCentral’s Nkosinathi Ndlovu to make the case for the company’s ambitious, R1.8-billion plan to roll out a charging station every 150km along South Africa’s national highways – and to explain why he believes the company is taking on “a timing risk, but not a business risk”. Roux walks TechCentral through the December 2024 launch of Charge’s first site near Wolmaransstad and the unit economics underpinning the roll-out: just seven vehicles a day at each station are needed to reach Ebitda break-even. He also explains why every facility is designed to operate entirely off-grid, citing data showing that EVs charged on Eskom’s coal-heavy network emit 5.8 tonnes of carbon-dioxide a year, more than a comparable petrol car at 4.4 tonnes. The conversation also tackles Charge’s unconventional fundraising strategy: a tokenised public offering on Mesh rather than a JSE listing, planned for June 2026. Roux argues that South Africa’s institutional capital is “extremely conservative” and that tokenisation will finally let ordinary investors into an infrastructure deal that has historically demanded R1-million minimums. The Development Bank of Southern Africa has already committed R100-million. Roux and Ndlovu also discuss: • How landowners hosting Charge stations receive 5% of charging revenue, and the rural economic development case that sits behind that model; • The offtake agreement with transport aggregator Zimi covering 50% of capacity at upcoming N3 corridor sites; • Charge’s formal objection to Sanral’s proposed policy giving it powers over businesses within 60m of national roads or 500m of interchanges, and the broader regulatory headwinds facing EV infrastructure; • How BYD’s planned 1MW supercharger network and incumbent operators like GridCars – which already records 5 000 charge sessions a month – are reshaping the competitive landscape; • Plans for 35MW truck-charging facilities and a long-term target of 120 stations across the national route network; and • Roux’s prediction on when South Africa will hit its EV tipping point – and the two ingredients he says the market still needs: sub-R500 000 EVs and a genuinely reliable national charging network. Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

    38 min
  2. TCS+ | The Up&Up Group on the hidden cost of AI

    13 MAY

    TCS+ | The Up&Up Group on the hidden cost of AI

    Companies large and small are pouring capital into AI projects, chasing the promise of efficiency, speed and scale. But as Jason Harrison, chief operating officer of The Up&Up Group, argues in this episode of TechCentral’s TCS+, the upfront price tag tells only a fraction of the story – and many South African boards are signing cheques without fully understanding what they’re buying. Harrison uses The Up&Up Group’s own experience in experimenting with and implementing AI to glean insight into the gap between the large promises by the technology (and its Silicon Valley pundits) and harsh realities of stalling projects in enterprises, especially at the integration layer. The conversation digs into the costs that rarely make it into a chief financial officer’s spreadsheet: • Policy and governance, Harrison argues, are not soft considerations – they are line items, often substantial ones. • The costs of error: the reputational damage, financial exposure and legal risk when copyrighted material slips into outputs or autonomous agents go off-script. • Agents that run amok, with companies then only discovering the problem once the cloud bill lands. Beyond the balance sheet, Harrison flags AI’s energy footprint as a societal cost the industry is still reckoning with. AI adoption is accelerating despite these risks and Harrison describes the current moment as a kind of nuclear arms race, driven by share-price pressure and a deep fear of being last. Much of today’s AI spend, he suggests, is Fomo (“fear of missing out”) dressed up as strategy. For tech leaders trying to make sober decisions inside a hype cycle, separating signal from noise has become a leadership skill in its own right, he says. Suggested solutions include a “test and learn” philosophy where many small, inexpensive AI experiments are run throughout an organisation before viable instances are scaled appropriately. Harrison cautions against one-size-fits-all deployments and argues that governance must sit close to the work rather than only in the boardroom. Quarter-to-quarter measurable objectives matter, he says, but only if they live inside a long-term strategy. Despite his sober-minded view on AI’s high costs, Harrison still has an optimistic perspective on the technology and its potential to transform society, especially on the African continent. While the developed world is using AI to get answers, Harrison suggests African organisations may end up using it to learn how to think – a subtle but important distinction, and a timely note for any leader weighing their next AI investment. Don't miss this discussion. TechCentral

    46 min
  3. TCS+ | The retirement decision most South Africans get wrong

    6 MAY

    TCS+ | The retirement decision most South Africans get wrong

    What happens to your retirement savings when you leave an employer is one of the most consequential financial decisions most South Africans will make – and one of the most commonly mishandled. In this podcast conversation with Mpho Chitapi, 10X Investments senior investment consultant Michael Rossouw sets out what should happen, what often does, and where the costs lie. When an employee resigns, their pension or provident fund does not automatically follow them. Money is frequently left behind in an old employer fund by default, or withdrawn in cash during the transition. The cash option is the most damaging. Rossouw cautions against it not because the money is needed less in the short term, but because removing capital interrupts compounding in a way that is extremely difficult to recover from later, even on higher future earnings. A point Rossouw made bluntly is worth restating, because it is widely misunderstood: under the Pension Funds Act, individuals do not own pension or provident funds. Only a company can establish one, and employees are members of an employer-sponsored fund rather than owners of it. When the employment ends, the relationship with the fund changes, too. What individuals can own are retirement annuities and preservation funds. A preservation fund is the vehicle into which an employee can transfer their accumulated retirement savings when they leave a job, taking direct control of how the money is invested and what they pay to have it managed. That control matters. A preservation fund lets the holder choose an asset allocation aligned to their risk profile and time horizon, and integrates with a retirement annuity or a new employer fund as part of a single retirement plan. Leaving money behind in an old employer fund offers none of those advantages. Rossouw’s sharpest warning is on fees. Even a well-structured retirement plan can be quietly undermined by costs that compound in the same way returns do – only in the wrong direction. He urged savers to interrogate the effective annual cost (EAC) of any product they sign on for. A 1.5 percentage point difference in annual fees sounds modest, but compounded over a working lifetime it can erode a meaningful share of an eventual retirement balance. Higher fees are not always justified by better performance, Rossouw says, and savers should be especially cautious about committing to high-cost products on long contracts. He is more measured on the role of online calculators and AI-powered tools, which have made it easier than ever for individuals to model their own retirement scenarios. The tools are useful, he says, but their inputs and assumptions need to be checked carefully – and outputs interrogated rather than accepted at face value. The underlying message is straightforward. Retirement planning when changing jobs does not require expertise. It requires attention, an understanding of the available vehicles and a clear-eyed view of what fees will cost over time. The decision made at the point of resignation – leave it, transfer it or cash it out – is one of the most consequential a person makes for their own future self. It is, ultimately, your money. TechCentral

    55 min
  4. TCS | The Cape Town start-up listening for TB with AI

    4 MAY

    TCS | The Cape Town start-up listening for TB with AI

    AI Diagnostics, a Cape Town-based med-tech company that has built an AI-powered stethoscope designed to detect tuberculosis, recently raised R85-million in a pre-series-A funding round. In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Nkosinathi Ndlovu speaks to the company’s CEO, Braden van Breda, about the funding round and its mission to transform TB screening across Africa and Asia. The round, led by the Steele Foundation for Hope, will fund the deployment of the Ostium – an AI-powered digital stethoscope that works in tandem with the company’s proprietary AI.TB model. The device is designed to detect signals associated with tuberculosis in lung sounds in real time, putting point-of-care diagnostic capabilities into the hands of the nurses, pharmacists and community health workers who often serve as the first contact in resource-constrained health systems. In a wide-ranging conversation, Van Breda explains why AI Diagnostics chose to tackle one of the world’s most underfunded diseases, and how an AI model can pick up TB signals that escape even trained clinicians. He also unpacks the painstaking work of building a TB-positive lung-sound dataset from scratch. Van Breda also delves into: • What the Ostium compares to a traditional stethoscope; • How the company handles real-world recording conditions, from noisy clinics to paediatric patients and HIV co-infection; • How AI Diagnostics stops the model from silently degrading as the device moves from a Khayelitsha clinic to rural Zambia or Vietnam; • The company’s goal of securing World Health Organisation certification and the path towards that; • How the Ostium is positioned against – or alongside – AI-assisted chest X-ray tools such as CAD4TB and Qure.ai's qXR; and • What it would realistically take to put an Ostium in every primary healthcare clinic on the continent by 2030. Don't miss the discussion! TechCentral

    37 min
  5. TCS+ | ‘The ISP for ISPs’: Vox’s shift to wholesale aggregator

    20 APR

    TCS+ | ‘The ISP for ISPs’: Vox’s shift to wholesale aggregator

    Vox, a well-established retail internet service provider is expanding its services to the wholesale market through aggregation. In this episode of TechCentral’s podcast series TCS+, Andre Eksteen, senior product manager for fibre to the business at Vox, discusses the rationale behind this strategy and the services Vox is offering as “the ISP for ISPs”. Eksteen delves into: • The thinking behind Vox’s move into the wholesale space; • The detail regarding Vox’s operating model as an aggregator with no physical infrastructure of its own; • The financial benefits ISPs derive from engage via an aggregator against connecting to a wholesaler themselves; • How aggregation services lower the operational burden on retail ISPs; • Vox’s white-labelling service and how wholesalers benefit from it; • The tooling Vox providers to help ISPs run their businesses more efficiently; • How Vox balances the potential internal conflict of interest arising from it being a retail competitor to the same ISPs to which it supplies wholesale services; and • The impact the existence of a wholesale aggregator like Vox will have on the retail ISP market. Don’t miss it! TechCentral

    17 min
  6. TCS | Werner Lindemann on how AI is rewriting the infosec rulebook

    15 APR

    TCS | Werner Lindemann on how AI is rewriting the infosec rulebook

    The pace at which artificial intelligence is reshaping the threat landscape is outstripping the ability of most organisations to defend themselves, with shadow AI, synthetic identity attacks and a looming quantum computing disruption all converging at once. That’s the view of DataGroupIT CEO Werner Lindemann, who joined Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show to unpack what business leaders should be doing about AI and information security. Lindemann, who spent more than 30 years in senior roles at BCX and Clickatell before joining the security solutions distributor, says the African threat environment is no longer a watered-down version of what is happening elsewhere. Attackers are deploying the same AI-powered tools globally, and AI-enabled phishing campaigns now achieve click-through rates that traditional defences were never designed to withstand. A bigger blind spot, he argues, is shadow AI – employees pasting sensitive data into unapproved AI tools without oversight. Lindemann says this is fast eclipsing the shadow IT problem of the past decade because the tools are free, frictionless and often invisible to security teams. The conversation also tackles the credibility crisis facing identity verification. With AI now able to clone a CEO’s voice in real time or generate synthetic profiles that pass biometric checks, Lindemann believes traditional verification methods are fundamentally flawed. A big challenge is helping boards understand the issue in business rather than technical terms. Lindemann also weighs in on the rise of the chief AI officer role, following Sanlam’s recent appointment, and on whether African organisations are equipped to adopt AI at the pace global peers are setting given the continent’s acute skills shortage. The discussion closes on quantum computing. Lindemann challenges the conventional view that the quantum threat is a decade away, and outlines what business leaders should be doing now to prepare for the post-quantum cryptography world – even if the risk still feels distant. TechCentral

    38 min
  7. TCS | Donovan Marsh on AI and the future of filmmaking

    7 APR

    TCS | Donovan Marsh on AI and the future of filmmaking

    Award-winning South African film director Donovan Marsh has pivoted to artificial intelligence filmmaking and believes generative AI tools could fundamentally reshape how movies are made – and who gets to make them. Marsh, whose 30-year career includes directing the Hollywood submarine thriller Hunter Killer starring Gerard Butler and Gary Oldman, the Spud films and iNumber Number, is the latest guest on the TechCentral Show. The economics, he tells TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, are extraordinary: a single complex scene in a traditional production requires crews, equipment, locations and days of scheduling, while AI tools collapse much of that overhead into work that can be done at a desk. But Marsh is clear that the creative work has not disappeared. He still directs shot by shot, much as he would on a conventional set, and uses a patchwork of different AI tools – no single product yet does everything. He has found that simpler prompts produce better results, saying over-prescription tends to degrade output quality. Marsh acknowledges the disruption this implies for camera operators, lighting crews, set designers and extras. But he argues that AI filmmaking could prove liberating for smaller filmmaking markets like South Africa, where the budgets to make ambitious local movies have dwindled. He has co-founded Dragon Studios AI with Ronnie Apteker and Stephen Cholerton, and is developing what he believes will be among the first AI-generated feature films. The tools are not quite there yet for a full 90-minute production, he says, but the gap is closing fast. Marsh also weighs in on where the so-called “uncanny valley” still trips up generative video, the future of the acting profession and what AI filmmaking could look like by 2029. TechCentral

    53 min
  8. TCS+ | Vodacom Business moves to crack the SME tech gap

    5 APR

    TCS+ | Vodacom Business moves to crack the SME tech gap

    Everyone agrees that small and medium enterprises are the backbone of the South African economy. But the reality on the ground tells a different story – too many small businesses are still running on spreadsheets and WhatsApp, locked out of the tools that could help them compete. In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod is joined in-studio by two members of the recently established Vodacom Business advisory board: Sannesh Beharie, managing executive of SME and mobile products at Vodacom Business, and Andrew Fulton, co-founder of data analytics firm Eighty20, a Vodacom Business partner. Vodacom Business set up its advisory board last year to bridge the gap between enterprise-grade technology and the small businesses that need it most, bringing together tech leaders and external specialists to help companies – as well as SMEs – navigate digital transformation. In the conversation, McLeod, Beharie and Fulton dig into what’s actually stopping small businesses from going digital, whether bundled connectivity and cloud offerings are genuinely good for SMEs or just a polite way of locking them in, and where AI fits into the picture for a 20-person business in South Africa. They also tackle how Vodacom Business positions itself against the likes of AWS, Google and Microsoft in the SME market, where a small business owner should spend their first R10 000 a month on tech, and the most common mistakes SMEs make when they do invest in technology. Don't miss the discussion on what a genuinely SME-first solution looks like – and whether the tech industry is guilty of designing for corporates and simply shrinking solutions down for smaller businesses. * TCS+ episodes are sponsored by the party concerned TechCentral

    35 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4.9
out of 5
14 Ratings

About

This is the main feed for all of TechCentral's shows and podcasts, including TCS - The TechCentral Show and TCS Impact Series. Never miss anything we produce and publish by subscribing to this feed.

Information

  • Creator
    TechCentral
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    150
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © NewsCentral Media
  • Show Website
    TechCentral (main feed)

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