South Africa’s readiness for AI integration: Launch of the first Annual AI Maturity Assessment
The AI Maturity Assessment Framework (AI MAF), launched in March 2025 as part of the BMZ Initiative FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All, aims to assess South Africa’s readiness for AI integration and marks the first of its kind both in South Africa and across the continent. It was designed as a foundational tool to guide the country’s journey towards understanding, measuring, and advancing AI maturity and national readiness.
A central feature of the AI MAF is its data-driven approach, which allows for the identification of current capabilities, opportunities for growth, and gaps in AI integration across various sectors. This enables the South African government to design informed, demand-driven policies that are directly aligned with AI’s potential while addressing the challenges specific to the country. The framework also fosters collaboration among stakeholders, ensuring that AI adoption remains inclusive and ethical as it evolves.
Unlike global benchmarking tools that prioritise direct cross-country comparisons, this framework is designed to meet South Africa’s unique socioeconomic, cultural, and technological landscape. This makes it adaptable not only to the public and private sectors but also to local government levels, ensuring that the framework can be tailored to various contexts within the country. Its primary aim is to assess South Africa’s preparedness for AI, considering both institutional readiness and the availability of AI expertise and capabilities.
By providing insights specific to South Africa’s situation, the framework plays an important role in supporting evidence-based decision-making at the governmental level. It also remains valuable to organisations and individuals developing their own AI maturity models that reflect local needs and challenges, contributing to a more informed and cohesive approach to AI integration across the country.
Delve into the report and unpack the methodology and insights:
- the design-science methodology to develop the eight domains of the framework
- how ISO standards provide global application to locally contextual framework
- findings from the first national assessment of AI maturity for South Africa
- why an evidence-based approach is key to South Africa’s global competitiveness, innovation ecosystem, and digital transformation.
This activity was a multi-stakeholder initiative, comprising of FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) and researchers from the University of the Western Cape (UWC). The initiative is supported by the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT) and the Department of Science Technology and Innovation (DSTI), and aims to contribute to the country’s national AI plan.
