An industry leader and digital transformation expert, Khaya Mbanga, BDO South Africa’s CIDO unpacks how the company is staying ahead of the AI revolution.
In this exclusive with CIO South Africa, Khaya Mbanga shares insights on how BDO stays ahead of the AI revolution and how other IT leaders can align their AI strategy with business imperatives.
The firm’s approach focuses on responsible AI that supports human expertise while maintaining ethical standards and governance. Through collaboration between IT and business leaders, BDO is aligning AI strategy with business goals to deliver measurable value and deeper client insights.
Q: How is BDO SA positioning itself to remain competitive as AI transforms the professional services landscape?
A: BDO South Africa is embracing AI and other flavours of AI such as gen AI and agentic AI, as a catalyst for increased productivity, operational efficiencies and smarter, more data-driven decision-making across our audit, advisory and tax practices.
We are positioning AI to assist our staff by augmenting human expertise with machine intelligence, leveraging AI to enhance service delivery, automate repetitive tasks and empower our professionals to focus on higher-value work. Our approach centres on responsible AI, ensuring technology augments rather than replaces human judgement.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you face in aligning AI strategy with business goals across such a diverse organisation
A: One of the key challenges is ensuring coherence between innovation ambitions and operational realities across our various service lines. Each business unit has unique data, processes and client expectations.
We address this by embedding AI governance within our broader digital strategy, supported by cross-functional steering committees that align priorities, budgets and measurable outcomes to firmwide strategic objectives.
Q: How do you ensure ethical and responsible use of AI while still driving innovation and efficiency?
A: Ethical AI is non-negotiable. We follow a structured governance model that incorporates fairness, transparency and accountability principles at every stage of the AI lifecycle. We have developed a framework that includes policies such as the responsible use of AI policy that guides our firm on the dos and don’ts of utilising AI tools.
The framework includes bias testing, explainability checks and human oversight. We also engage multidisciplinary teams – combining legal, risk, IT and human capital expertise – to ensure that innovation never compromises trust or client confidentiality. We conduct AI POCs in a restricted environment, infused with all the necessary governance required by our framework. Once the AI POCs are successful we scale in a controlled manner, ensuring we jump through the necessary internal approval mechanisms.
Q: In what ways is AI changing the skill sets you prioritise when hiring or upskilling your teams?
A: The rise of AI has shifted our focus towards hybrid skill sets that blend technical literacy with strategic and analytical thinking. We prioritise talent who can interpret data-driven insights and translate them into actionable business value. Upskilling initiatives in data analytics, prompt engineering and AI ethics are now integral to our continuous learning culture, ensuring every professional can confidently operate in an AI-augmented environment. Our learning paths for all roles include digital literacy incorporating AI skills.
Q: How is BDO leveraging AI to enhance decision making and deliver deeper client insights?
A: AI enables us to extract real-time insights from large volumes of structured and unstructured data coming from three main sources of data – ERP (primarily for resource management, billing and invoicing), CRM (client and account management) and Auditing Platform. The main aim is to improve both speed and accuracy in decision-making. For example, in audit and assurance, AI tools assist in anomaly detection and risk scoring, while in advisory, predictive analytics help us anticipate client needs. This allows our teams to deliver more forward-looking and evidence-based guidance to clients.
Q: What lessons have you learnt from early AI implementations that are shaping your current approach?
A: Early projects taught us that successful AI adoption is as much about culture as it is about technology. Pilot initiatives revealed the importance of clear change management, user education and transparency about AI’s limitations. We’ve since refined our deployment framework to emphasise stakeholder engagement, iterative learning and scalability, ensuring that innovation is sustainable and inclusive.
Q: How do you manage data governance and quality to ensure AI systems deliver accurate and trustworthy outputs?
A: Strong data governance is the foundation of our AI ecosystem. We maintain robust data management standards – focusing on data lineage, validation and compliance with local and international regulations such as Popia. We’ve recently implemented an enterprise-wide data loss protection initiative (Microsoft Purview) which has greatly assisted in better protection of our data landscape. We are also investing in secure, high-quality data pipelines and regular audits of our models, we ensure the reliability and integrity of the insights our systems generate.
Q: What role does collaboration between IT and business leaders play in accelerating AI adoption at BDO?
A: Collaboration is essential. We have built a model where IT, business and innovation leaders jointly define AI use cases, ensuring alignment between technical feasibility and strategic relevance. This partnership accelerates implementation and strengthens adoption, as business leaders become advocates for AI-enabled transformation rather than passive recipients of technology.
Q: How do you measure the return on investment and long-term impact of AI projects within the firm?
A: We assess ROI through both quantitative and qualitative measures – from efficiency gains and time savings to improved client satisfaction and new revenue streams. More importantly, we evaluate AI’s contribution to our strategic goals: enhanced quality, reduced risk and greater agility. Over time, we expect AI to shift from a cost-saving lever to a differentiator in delivering distinctive client value.
Q: Looking ahead, where do you see the greatest opportunities for AI to redefine value in professional services?
A: The next frontier lies in augmented advisory – where AI transforms professional services from reactive to predictive. By integrating intelligent automation, generative analytics and agentic AI systems, firms like BDO can deliver personalised, insight-driven solutions at scale. We believe the firms that succeed will be those that combine cutting-edge AI with empathy, ethics and deep client understanding.
