Over 2,900 executives from the public and private sectors attended the Huawei South Africa Connect 2026 event. The goal of the event was to discuss what steps South African organizations need to take to transition from isolated AI pilot projects to full-scale implementation.
The event was held under the slogan 'Where innovation shapes the future.' It used South Africa's ranking as a leader in AI readiness among Sub-Saharan African countries as a starting point. Sessions were presented focusing on the potential of AI in the energy, finance, telecommunications, education, and public service sectors.
Communications Minister Solly Malatsi emphasized that South Africa's digital future depends not only on technology but also on citizen participation. He noted that the primary tasks for expanding access to the digital economy are device availability and connectivity. Malatsi stated that AI should be viewed not as a threat to fear or a fleeting trend, but as one of the greatest opportunities of modern times to solve the most pressing development challenges.
Ming, CEO of Huawei South Africa, opened the keynote speech. He referred to the World AI Conference in Shanghai, where South Africa became one of the founders of a new Global AI Cooperation Organization. Ming presented a three-stage plan for achieving AI readiness: informatization enables connectivity, digitalization makes data work, and intelligence creates new economic value. He cited Huawei's projects in China related to networks and power systems as proof of this approach's effectiveness.
According to Ming, large-scale AI implementation is impossible without a robust digital infrastructure. He stressed that developing economies aiming to advance in intelligence must gradually strengthen the foundations, including networks, data, and industrial digital transformation.
As organizations move beyond AI pilot projects, Nicholas Ma, Vice President of Corporate Affairs and President of Global Key Accounts for Government and Enterprise at Huawei, presented the company's ACT path. This framework helps businesses transition from testing to full deployment. ACT first identifies high value-added use cases before organizations configure AI models on industry data. According to Huawei, this approach has helped identify over 1,000 core manufacturing scenarios and form a community of more than four million developers.
Ma noted that South Africa is at a critical stage of leapfrogging in AI integration. The AI market exceeds 50 billion rand and is projected to triple by 2030. He added that decisive action today will help not only ensure individual success but also build an ecosystem where everyone thrives.
Kui Zheng, Deputy General Manager of Huawei South Africa, reported that by the end of the decade, AI could contribute between 1 trillion and 1.4 trillion rand to the South African economy and create up to 400,000 new jobs. He mentioned that local implementations are already underway, including a railway security system that reduced cable theft by 80%. Zheng emphasized that the future of AI will be built not by one company, even Huawei, but by an open ecosystem of partners, developers, and customers jointly creating value.
Clients from the energy, financial, government IT, and telecommunications sectors also spoke at the event. Len de Villiers, Head of IT and Management Group at Eskom, stated that the utility company is building an AI-based smart grid, implementing 20 AI initiatives across eight business areas. These include predictive maintenance and a microgrid in Limpopo, which connected over 700 households to reliable power. De Villiers said that Eskom's digital transformation aims to create an intelligent, secure, and inclusive energy platform for the next era of South Africa's growth.
Standard Bank moved beyond isolated AI pilot projects to large-scale deployment through collaboration with Huawei. Khomotso Molabe, Director of IT for Personal and Private Banking and Deputy Group CIO at Standard Bank, reported that this partnership allowed them to consolidate infrastructure across 10 African countries and improve operational efficiency. Molabe believes this experience can serve as a model for all industries.
Huawei's local partner ecosystem now includes over 1,400 South African companies, providing 94.7% of local revenue and over 90% of supply and service work. Lucas Sia, Director of Development and Corporate Partner Management at Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa, reported that this network provides solutions across various industries, including digital twin and municipal services solutions with BCX, smart retail solutions with Altron, connected healthcare solutions with Gijima, and secure paperless government solutions with CoCre8. Sia concluded that the company supports growth through innovation, opportunities, and competencies, thereby 'strengthening South Africa, being based in South Africa.'
Huawei has been operating in South Africa for 27 years under the motto 'In South Africa, for South Africa,' investing in ICT infrastructure to support the country's digital economy. The company announced its intention to continue working with clients and partners to provide industry-specific solutions. Huawei and its partners concluded the event with the joint launch of these solutions.
At the WAIC 2026 event, Huawei Cloud CEO Zhou Yu Feng introduced the AgentArts platform and the openJiuwen framework. These developments aim to implement enterprise-level agents, ensuring stability, security, and the ability to coordinate multiple agents.
Zhou Yu Feng outlined the company's strategy in enterprise AI at WAIC 2026. He emphasized that transitioning from demonstration agent models to full production systems requires three interconnected achievements: the adoption of open protocols, the utilization of reusable industry resources, and the application of a platform approach that raises both the upper and lower thresholds of agent capabilities. The central element is AgentArts—a full lifecycle platform that includes AgentStudio for flexible development, AgentRun for reliable operation, and AgentOps for continuous functioning, with openJiuwen serving as the open-source core framework.
The primary problem Huawei Cloud addresses is the gap in stability between demonstration and production agent environments. Zhou noted that agents are gradually transforming the traditional SaaS ecosystem. However, enterprises require agents capable of 24/7 operation, self-optimization, defense against AI-inherent threats, and providing constant observability of task execution chains. AgentArts solves this by introducing multi-level controllers, self-evolution capabilities, Agent Identity, session-level isolation, dynamic tokens, and detailed permission control to minimize agent errors during complex operations.
OpenJiuwen, an open-source framework for enterprise agents, shares over 90% of its code with AgentArts. It introduces two engineering paradigms: Coordination Engineering for the collaboration of multiple agents and Symbiosis Engineering for long-term human-agent cooperation. The framework treats large language models, memory stores, and agent protocols as new computational, storage, and network resources, respectively, which are managed through a unified corporate agent operating system (AgentOS). CLI and MCP serve as standard interfaces for calling external tools and services.
Several financial institutions have already begun using these technologies. China Postal Savings Bank developed an agent execution mechanism using the Huawei Cloud and openJiuwen stack, achieving automated 24/7 operation with minute-level data collection, analysis, and multi-channel distribution. Tianyancha integrated 160 MCP capabilities and converted six risk control scenarios into reusable Skills. Furthermore, Huawei Cloud, in collaboration with ICBC, China UnionPay, and over ten other financial institutions, launched the 'AI Dream Industrial Factory' initiative in the Smart Finance Zone to create and exchange industry-specific agent assets covering mobile banking, intelligent marketing, risk control, and remote banking scenarios.
The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) forecasts that agent penetration will reach 70% by 2027 and 90% by 2030. Nevertheless, CAICT Director Wei Kai pointed out that individual efficiency does not equal organizational efficiency. Enterprises cannot deploy agents in isolation; they require engineering methodologies for goal setting, roadmaps, evaluation systems, and continuous iteration. Simultaneously, issues such as business integration, data governance, multi-agent interaction, end-to-end security, and responsibility distribution between humans and machines must be addressed. Huawei Cloud's platform approach aims to provide the infrastructural layer necessary to achieve this systematic transformation of agents within enterprises, moving them from simple Q&A responses to executing real business tasks in banking, energy, manufacturing, and other key industries.
