King Price Insurance CTO Dr Eugene Wessels has watched technology reshape industries for 25 years. In his view, nothing in that time compares to what is happening right now in the age of AI, but he is less worried about his developers than he is about everyone else.
There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes from understanding and knowing enough about a system to see exactly where it is heading and feeling the gap between that destination and where an organisation currently stands.
Eugene carries that anxiety with unusual self-awareness. He refrains from dressing up his concerns in reassuring corporate language about “embracing transformation” or “leveraging opportunity”. He says, rather plainly, that he is scared.
“As little as a year ago, nobody would have anticipated the impact of AI, in particular the impact AI coding has had on the IT domain,” he says. “And I can only see one outcome: a fundamental redesign of everything, a rewrite of everything. If we don’t do that over the next 10 years, we might become very uncompetitive. I strongly believe that,” he says firmly.
Eugene oversees the technology function of around 150 people at a company that has grown from a startup disruptor into a multi-jurisdiction insurer with operations spanning South Africa, Namibia and Denmark. He has spent the last 11 years using technology to make King Price Insurance competitive against incumbents with far greater resources. Now he believes the rules of that competition are being rewritten in real time. But the greatest risk with the new technology is far from technical.
“The IT guys will keep up. I’m less worried about them. The education system will indoctrinate the next generation. What worries me is the business people because it doesn’t come naturally to them.”
The skills gap nobody is talking about
When CIOs discuss AI readiness, the conversation tends to orbit the technology function – developers upskilling, legacy systems modernising, new tooling being evaluated. Eugene reckons this framing misses a deeper problem.
His concern is cross-functional. The 150 people in his IT department are, he believes, ultimately manageable. They are in an industry where continuous learning is a condition of relevance, and the education pipeline will eventually produce graduates who have grown up treating AI-assisted development as simply how work is done. The harder problem sits in every other department in the building.
“If I fast-forward where we are now to 10 years from now, and I look at how AI is changing the IT landscape and apply that principle to marketing, legal, HR, sales and distribution, collections and all of those business functions, I’m very scared that non-technology people will be left behind,” he says. “Our competitors will have younger, more agile people who have embraced the relevant AI functions across those domains, and they will outperform us.”
The challenge is not that business professionals are unwilling to learn. It is that the adoption curve demanded of them is steeper than most have yet internalised. Eugene describes a process of holding hands and educating, walking people through what AI means for their specific function, what tools exist, what habits need to change. It is slow, uneven work, and the technology is not waiting.
He compares the current inflection point to South Africa's shift from paper tax returns to eFiling. That transition felt enormous at the time with one medium replacing another. Today’s shift, he argues, is that this time every business domain is being affected simultaneously, and at an alarming pace.
What comes after AI?
Eugene is careful to distinguish between what he knows and what he suspects. He does not claim a precise map of the future. But he has three forecasts he returns to consistently, each building on the last:
The screen era ends: Eugene predicts that apps and websites will become as primitive in a decade as paper forms look today. The digital channels we currently treat as the pinnacle of customer engagement are, in his view, transitional technology.
Voice and intent replace interfaces: The dominant mode of interacting with technology will shift away from screens towards voice and eventually towards something closer to expressed intent, where an AI agent anticipates what you need before you fully articulate it.
The alter ego agent: Technology will become an intimate, persistent presence and not a tool you pick up and put down, but a contextual companion that carries the history of your life and operates as a kind of personal alter ego across everything you do.
Eugene is particularly measured on this prediction. He sees the trajectory clearly enough – from a smartphone that is close to you, to a Meta smart-glasses device that is closer still, to something more embedded in the texture of daily life.
“I can definitely see an end-state where we are much closer to computers,” he says. “Not in the sense it is today, but more like an alter ego, a personal assistant for everything in life. The Meta Ray-Bans are a great example. That is already a lot closer than your phone. But it is not yet embedded in you,” he concludes.
