Originally published on LinkedIn, October 11, 2026
“F*ck AI!”; These were the first words I heard at Comic-Con a fortnight ago, from a comic artist on a panel. Not a banker, not a consultant but an artist watching his craft get scraped. On AI, “Comic Guy” was Everyman. Unfiltered radical honesty!
Back in the office the response to AI is less honest. Tuckman called it “storming”: “forming” is done (almost 90% of companies now use AI somewhere), “performing” is rare (6% make real money from it) and most are in the fight in between.
“Storming” inside a bank can look like theatre. Steering committees. Centres of excellence. Land grabs for the AI budget and defences of existing turf. Constructive friction is a necessary good. That said “cosplay” must stay at Comic-Con.
Amidst the storm there are “no-regrets” moves to fast-track “norming”:
- Fix the plumbing; the platforms, data and architecture that let AI plug in. Without them every pilot is a demo.
- Pick a few domains and go deep.
- Hire the best people, and I mean the best. I saw two adverts recently for AI leads with 10 years experience at 6-figure salaries. WTF! The same institutions will pay 8-9 figures in consulting fees and 10-11 figures in acquisitions to fill the gaps that talent would have closed. “Rewired” (McKinsey) is blunt: “we have yet to see a company that outsourced its way to tech and AI excellence”. Discovery Limited leads on talent. Capitec has at least three “big hitters”. FirstRand has the guy that redefined risk with SLMs in 2019 and wrote the book on AI in Africa. The industry as a whole though is running light.
- Put that talent and Business in one room and make them hold each other to account. Talent without business builds toys. Business without talent is “unconsciously incompetent”.
- Flexibility is non-negotiable, and only elite talent allows for it. Cloud AND on-prem, open AND closed models, frontier AND “good enough”, LLMs AND SLMs. Lock into one vendors’ toll road, or one country’s model that can be switched off or repriced tomorrow, and you have bet the bank on somebody elses roadmap. Sovereignty is a people capability before it is a procurement one.
- The CEO must own it. Today is the worst AI will ever be. Every CEO needs an AI expert at their right hand and the humility to upskill. If the CEO does not champion AI, you will fall behind.
From “norming” to “performing”: The “6%” do not overlay AI on old processes, they redesign around AI.
Back to the comic artist. Andrej Karpathy has a great metaphor: do not build Iron Man robots, build Iron Man suits. Tony Stark is still inside. Jarvis amplifies him. That is the human story of AI in an organisation: agency, multiplied. Every person in your bank can build their own suit this year.
F*ck AI? No. Suit up!
Planning a strategy session? For a dispassionate read of the landscape, or a neutral facilitator in the room, mail brad@a2bstrategy.co.za
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