Microsoft South Africa CEO Vukani Mngxati believes government is missing out on the opportunities presented by the AI revolution because cloud adoption in the public sector is lagging the private sector.
Speaking to TechCentral in an interview on the sidelines of the Johannesburg leg of the Microsoft AI Tour 2026 event on Thursday, Mngxati warned that government’s slow cloud adoption could hamper plans to offer digital services to South African citizens.
“What you see in the public service is that there is a lot of on-prem activity still, but I think that trend will have to change because of the transformations driven by AI,” Mngxati said.
“Frankly, AI workloads require a different kind of infrastructure availability and it’s going to be difficult for the public service to gain any kind of momentum with on-prem capability. The opportunity for us to reimagine how we are providing government services as a nation is significant, and this is the inflection point. Are we going to be at the frontier, or are we going to be a laggard?”
Citing the government of the United Arab Emirates as an example, Mngxati drew parallels between the digitisation goals outlined by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his 2025 state of the nation address and the UAE’s digitisation of government services implemented using Microsoft cloud infrastructure.
Cloud modernisation
Ramaphosa announced a revamp of the gov.za domain as part of a government-wide digital reform initiative that would “transform the relationship between citizens and government and create one government that is accessible to every person at a touch”. Central to this transformation is the digitisation of home affairs and its implementation of a national digital ID system.
Mngxati said for government to achieve this, its cloud modernisation journey must be accelerated. He acknowledged that while government entities are hampered by different factors such as a lack of skills or budgetary constraints, engagements by Microsoft and its partners across government suggest the appetite for cloud adoption is strong.
Read: South Africa unveils big state digital reform programme
“There is no doubt in my mind that the transformation of our government is going to be heavily reliant on the pace at which just the foundational elements are managed. I’m not even talking AI at this stage, just cloud adoption. Once you’ve adopted the cloud, then they can be in a position to say, ‘Okay, what can we benefit from generative AI?’,” said Mngxati. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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