Technology Perspective 2023

Overview

Twenty-six percent of CEOs in Africa believe their companies will be exposed to cyber risk in the next 12 months, and 33% in the next five years. This indicates that among CEOs in Africa, cyber risks are not considered a major risk compared to other factors such as inflation and macroeconomic volatility. 

These statistics are based on the responses of 282 CEOs in Africa who participated in PwC’s 26th Annual Global CEO Survey. In this publication, entitled Africa Business Agenda: Technology Perspective 2023, we take a closer look at tech-enabled transformation, as well as CEOs’ concerns of disruption and emerging technologies. 

New technology adoption in Africa

In the financial services sector, 87% of CEOs in Africa say they're seeing a significant technology disruption to their business models as opposed to 50% globally. Most organisations are investing in improved technology capability — a process that we typically saw starting during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, due to a rapid shift in customer behaviour to digital capabilities. Organisations were forced to start investing in their digital capabilities and build their client-facing assets, and this focus on client engagement solutions started to highlight the importance of data and the shift to cloud.

In our survey we noted that organisations are trying to drive growth and are looking more at adopting cloud solutions, resulting in massive investments in front-end capabilities.

We also look at how digitalisation is impacting business productivity and enabling the workforce to become more efficient and productive, resulting in improved overall performance. The impact of digitalisation on business performance is significant, and organisations must leverage digital tools to improve productivity. However, the success of any digital transformation strategy hinges on performance management, employee upskilling, and a people-first approach.

Opportunities from increased digital adoption 

While technology adoption rates in Africa are low, it is worth noting that increased investment in adoption can result in more opportunities for job creation, new skills acquisition, opening up new business areas and adding more value. CEOs in Africa are also acknowledging the importance of catching up with the rest of the world in the technology race. 

What remains key is that managing technology adoption presents an opportunity to mitigate the risk in safeguarding operations against potential cyber attacks, and CEOs will need to show a willingness to prioritise cybersecurity even amongst the burden of dealing with challenges that they deem to be more urgent.