AI <\/a>companies, it\u2019s not going to happen.<\/p>\n\u201cSo we are launching a venture capital fund. I look at what is happening in the US, in the UK, and all these countries are throwing money at AI innovation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have the same intellectual capital in South Africa that is available in the EU or US. But unless someone takes deliberate action to support that intellectual capital with money, then all we are doing is we are exporting our best software engineers, and we\u2019ll land up importing the systems that will actually drive our economy going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
She adds that when she says Sygnia is going to invest in start-ups, that\u2019s exactly what she means. Three people in a room with a good idea and technical skills, who need corporate support to build their businesses around the intellectual property that they own.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings that they are already building but have no idea how to tap into company markets where they can make money out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Between what she learnt from scratch investing in start-up businesses in the UK and what Sygnia knows about technology, they\u2019ve always been at the leading edge of innovation, she says.<\/p>\n
The idea is to put some of their own money behind the venture capital fund, find the entrepreneurs and open the fund to institutional investors in South Africa.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to run a very structured national competition where we want the founders of these small businesses to compete, obviously in a very private, NDA [nondisclosure agreement] space, with ideas and with technical talent, and we will select from those ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n
No time to waste<\/p>\n
She believes there\u2019s no shortage of talent in South Africa. \u201cWe\u2019ve got some of the leading universities: Stellenbosch University, University of Cape Town, Wits, University of Pretoria.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no time to waste, she says. She wants the fund up and running, seeded with capital, within the next six months.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not just about throwing money at these start-ups. We will show the founders how to become companies, how to get the proper licensing, how to market themselves, how to turn the concepts they have into tangible propositions. We bring business experience skills to the table, they bring their ideas and innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once they\u2019ve set it up and seeded it with capital, they will market the fund to institutional investors in South Africa.<\/p>\n
She wants a regulatory guideline which, if necessary, forces pension funds to invest 0.5% of their assets into venture funds which drive this kind of innovation. \u201cThat\u2019s Mickey Mouse money with potential for huge returns.\u201d<\/p>\n
How is institutional investment in this venture capital fund going to move the needle on our unemployment crisis?<\/p>\n
AI is going to lead to massive labour displacement. Massive. But it\u2019s going to happen in white-collar jobs. There\u2019s a difference between robotics in manufacturing and AI-driven technologies which are being implemented within the legal profession, accounting profession, finance and so on.<\/p>\n
\u2014 \u00a0Magda Wierzycka<\/p>\n
This is why after walking out of Davos she wanted to press a massive delete button, she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is going to lead to massive labour displacement. Massive. But it\u2019s going to happen in white-collar jobs. There\u2019s a difference between robotics in manufacturing and AI-driven technologies which are being implemented within the legal profession, accounting profession, finance and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n
So she\u2019s asking institutions to invest in something that will lead to a white-collar jobs bloodbath and put their own employees on the street?<\/p>\n
\u201cYes and no. That investment is happening globally. I\u2019m just asking South Africa not to be left behind.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe truth is you need government in this instance because there are not a lot of solutions to the fact that this is happening, present tense, other than regulation and legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Otherwise you have AI concentrated in the hands of eight people who own Meta, Google, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft etc, making decisions on behalf of 8-billion people who did not give them a mandate to do what they\u2019re doing or build what they\u2019re building, she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cSouth Africa cannot be left behind. We cannot be in a state where we become even more dependent on the world for importing technology that we should be building ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
In terms of job displacement, people will have to learn new skills, reskill themselves and then adapt and adopt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are so many opportunities, and South Africa is nowhere. AI is a necessity. It\u2019s not a case of \u2018should we be doing it?\u2019 We must be doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about being part of the global conversation, she says. \u201cMaking ourselves relevant on the global stage, attracting international investment. Otherwise we\u2019ll just be importing technology and paying in dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
Business Times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Magda Wierzycka, founder and CEO of Sygnia, South Africa\u2019s second-largest asset management company, is set to launch a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[222954,222960,222959,222961,222953,222963,222952,222957,222956,222962,28,158,222965,222955,222958,222964],"class_list":["post-484071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-agentic-economy-ai","tag-ai-entrepreneurship-south-africa","tag-ai-innovation-funding-sa","tag-ai-intellectual-capital","tag-ai-intellectual-capital-sa","tag-ai-job-displacement-impact","tag-ai-start-up-competition-sa","tag-ai-technology-in-south-africa","tag-ai-venture-capital-south-africa","tag-ai-driven-innovation","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-institutional-investors-ai","tag-magda-wierzycka-ai","tag-south-african-ai-start-ups","tag-venture-fund-competition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}