By Lesedi Sibiya-Diplomatic Insider 

The CNBC Africa AI Summit took place at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, where the Chairman of and co-founder of CNBC Africa, Rakesh Wahi, as he explained that cheaper tokens didn’t necessarily mean that it translates to lower overall costs as AI usage continues to grow. 

He stated that AI is moving in such a direction in which humans would manage a fleet of agents, with an orchestrator being able to oversee one or more agents where they would also in turn manage sub-agents in order to achieve a specific outcome.

 “In order for an agent to be useful to enterprises, you need a number of things, but most importantly, I think you need two things. You need a context window big enough to process tokens, and you need cheap inference,” said Wahi. 

“The more complicated a task is, the more tokens get utilised, and thus requiring a larger context window,” said Wahi. Wahi also stated that China views AI as a part of a national industrial strategy, and compared to the United States had mainly geared towards a more traditional approach which relies on private-sector leadership.

 “China firms are less obsessed with artificial general intelligence and more focused on deploying cheaper models into real-world systems, partly because they have less access to frontier chips and capital,” he said.

 Wahi also emphasised the requirements of the AI industry as he explained that the growing demand for AI has become an increased insurmountable level of expenditure. He mentioned that billions have been invested by hyperscalers in data centre expansion and that the trend is expected to continue. 

“This has largely been financed by debt, and we saw more borrowing in the first six months of 2026 than all of last year,” said Wahi. Another note that Wahi explained was that lower-return work would increasingly be handled by small models as well as cheaper workflows.

 “So adoption is becoming less about what frontier models can do in principle, but more about the price and scarcity of the inputs required to make AI optional at scale” said Wahi.

 “We need to find a balance. If we outsource too much thinking, writing, remembering and problem solving to AI, we may become extraordinarily productive, but we are slowly weakening the very skills required to judge whether the output is any good,” said Wahi. 

Telkom SA Group Executive for Innovation and Transformation ,Mmaki Jantjies, explained that the key signifiers of a country pushing innovation is moving beyond being an AI consumer and she mentioned that according to the South African National Advisory Council on Innovation, gross expenditure on research and development had stood at approximately 0.6% of GDP and steadily declining. 

“Pure emerging and global economies invest between 2% and 4%, with the OECD average sitting at around 2.7% and leading innovative economies around the world investing up to 5%,” said Jantjies.