KEY POINTS
- Eskom is reviewing 220 active AI pilots, requiring each to prove a clear business case or risk being cut.
- The utility’s most promising AI deployments cover predictive maintenance, smart grid management and digital twinning of power stations.
- CTIO Len de Villiers pointed to Johnson & Johnson’s culling of 700 AI pilots as a cautionary lesson in unchecked technology spending.
Eskom has a problem that sounds almost enviable: too much artificial intelligence.
South Africa’s state-owned power utility is sitting on 220 active AI pilots spread across its business units.
But rather than treating the volume as a badge of innovation, its chief technology and information officer wants to cut it down significantly.
Len de Villiers made that position plain at the industrial digital and intelligent transformation forum hosted by Huawei at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.
The message wasn’t anti-AI. It was pro-accountability.
“You will not stop AI affecting your organisation — if you ignore it, you will be in trouble,” De Villiers said. “We’re going to make sure that AI is not inhibited but carefully directed.”
The problem, he said, is that too many pilots are running without a solid financial rationale behind them. Each one needs a business case. That business case needs to make sense. And there has to be a return on investment.
Much harder in a large organisation where departments chase the technology because it’s available, not necessarily because it solves something specific.
A Warning From Johnson & Johnson
De Villiers didn’t come to Barcelona without a cautionary tale. He pointed to Johnson & Johnson, which at one point had 900 AI pilots running across its global operations. The pharmaceutical giant eventually axed 700 of them.
“Can you imagine all the money spent on the 700 that was wasted?” he said.
It’s a pointed example, and the implication for Eskom is obvious. Scale without discipline is just expensive noise. Running pilots is easy. Running pilots that produce measurable value is a different exercise entirely.
As part of its own rationalisation effort, Eskom is now asking department heads to rank their AI pilots and identify which ones are worth keeping. The rest face the chop.
