AI is no longer a disruptor, it is our current reality – and South Africa must catch up

For the last two or so years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been spoken of in hushed tones, a technological disruptor overwhelming many and invoking reactive responses. 

AI is not waiting for anyone to catch their breath and it’s no longer the “next big thing” poised to upend industries.

That’s because it’s already a fully embedded part of our reality, shaping the way we learn, work, and make decisions every single day.

The global AI surge of 2023/2024 propelled by tools like ChatGPT shook higher education to its core. Universities and colleges suddenly found themselves grappling with assignments that looked perfect on paper yet rang hollow in substance.

Essays produced with AI often lacked local relevance, cultural nuance, and the lived experience that gives knowledge meaning.

In South Africa, that problem is magnified by the fact that many AI tools are trained primarily on Global North data, producing outputs that reflect foreign priorities, values, and assumptions.

This raises an important question: whose future is AI preparing us for?

At Eduvos, we’ve answered this question with what we call a technocritical framework.

This is a balanced approach that resists both the AI cheerleaders who see no flaws and the AI sceptics who would ban it outright.

Instead, we advocate for a critical, care-filled, and curious engagement with AI, guided by five pillars:

1. Participatory Design – involving students and staff in co-creating AI use cases.
2. Critical Thinking – interrogating AI outputs to ask: whose data, whose voices, whose perspectives?
3. Contextual Learning – ensuring local realities and African knowledge systems are central.
4. Ongoing Dialogue – keeping bias, ethics, and relevance at the heart of the conversation.
5. Ethics of Care – prioritising inclusion and wellbeing over speed or scale.

This framework is already being put into practice. Law students, for example, are asked to cross-check AI outputs against South African case law, while commerce students analyse AI-generated reports alongside real South African economic data.

Students can use AI, but they must embed it in their own contexts and cite it responsibly.

This builds both accountability and confidence in their ability to work alongside these tools without losing their voice.The shift we need to make in South Africa is not about banning AI or blindly adopting it. It’s about shaping AI intentionally.

Any AI personalisation for our learners must include cultural, linguistic, and economic contexts. African learners cannot afford to be passive consumers of foreign systems; they must be active, critical, and creative participants in shaping AI’s role in their education and society.

This means cultivating future-ready AI skills that go beyond technical proficiency. Learners must develop AI literacy, understanding how systems are built, what data underpins them, and what biases and assumptions they carry.

They must practice critical engagement, questioning default outputs, identifying omissions, and assessing relevance to local realities.

They must learn contextual adaptation, applying AI to real African challenges such as public health crises or environmental sustainability.

And they must embrace collaborative ethics, contributing to inclusive and participatory technology design processes that reflect the communities they serve.

For AI to truly serve African education, investment is needed in several areas.

We must create contextual AI training data and models, much like Australia has recently done by opening domestic data for training.

We must embed a technocritical pedagogy, where AI literacy and ethics form part of teacher training and curricula.

We must establish ethical AI standards that are rooted in African values and responsive to local needs.

And we must foster cross-sector collaboration, bringing together universities, industry, government, civil society, and communities to shape AI in ways that serve our shared future.

The real disruption, then, is not AI itself — it’s our readiness, or lack thereof, to engage with it critically, locally, and ethically. 

The technology is already here, integrated into the workflows of multinational corporations, start-ups, and even our smartphones. Pretending it is still an optional extra or a “future trend”, risks leaving our students unprepared for the realities they will face in the workplace and as citizens.

True future readiness will come from blending technical competence with critical engagement, contextual intelligence, and ethical responsibility.

We must think carefully about the long-term consequences of the technological choices we make today, because in shaping AI’s role in education, we are also shaping the collective future our students will inherit, and create.

The question is no longer whether AI will change our world. It already has. The challenge now is ensuring it changes it in ways that serve all South Africans.

Dr Nyx McLean, Eduvos. 

BUSINESS REPORT