In This Issue

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved quickly from novelty to everyday business infrastructure. It now sits inside email platforms, document systems, customer service channels, finance tools and analytics environments, influencing how decisions are prepared and how work gets done.

The cost of building something new has quietly broken from its twenty-five-year curve. Geopolitical fragmentation and AI-led disruption have merged into a single storm over every boardroom, and the assumptions baked into most innovation processes no longer match the world they are trying to navigate. What follows is the argument for why in-house innovation stalls under pressure, and what works instead.

Read our exclusive cover story titled Mission focus – does AI enable strategy or create distraction? by Steven Ambrose, CEO, Strategy Worx Consulting, plus a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics.

The Financial Intelligence Centre’s attempt to impose retrospective penalties for a period extending fully five years prior to the existence of any lawful authority is not merely misguided, it is a brazen affront to the rule of law.

The local business news cycle has taken a dark and repetitive turn. Week after week, headlines are dominated by a relentless spike in organisations falling victim to sophisticated hacks, data breaches, and crippling ransomware attacks. From local municipalities to major political parties like the ANC, no sector seems immune.

The world of work is changing faster than our education systems can track, which means preparing for a single career or a fixed set of skills is, paradoxically, one of the least effective strategies a young person can adopt today. The most important shift is to think about careers as journeys rather than destinations.

Artificial intelligence has constantly been written about for the past three years. The hype, the digital transformation it promises, the productivity gains, and the threat to jobs, particularly in professional services, and finance, specifically. It is a topical and sometimes divisive subject.

For a long time, the digital playbook for businesses was relatively straightforward. Invest in SEO, rank on Google, drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into customers. That model still holds value, but it is no longer the full picture.

Today’s business environment is no longer defined by a single shock but by overlapping geopolitical and economic disruptions reshaping the macroeconomic landscape. Businesses are operating amid a polycrisis, where conflict, trade tensions, inflationary pressure and supply chain instability continue to reinforce uncertainty.

Nobody likes a know-it-all. In Shirley Valentine, the British cult classic, a headmistress asks her class, “What is man’s greatest invention?” Answers fly - Sputnik, the Hoover, the aeroplane, the internal combustion engine. Shirley knows the answer but is ignored in favour of the usual teacher’s pets. Only when no raised hands remain does the headmistress relent: “Oh, very well, Shirley. You might as well get it wrong along with everybody else.”