Regenesys Launches Continent's First Dedicated School of AI

South Africa is haemorrhaging economic opportunity. The World Economic Forum now estimates that AI and automation will displace 92 million jobs globally by 2030 while creating 170 million new ones, but only for workers with the right skills. In South Africa, where youth unemployment already exceeds 45%, the window to get ahead of this curve is now.

On 9 April 2026, Regenesys Education responds with two linked announcements: the inaugural Regenesys AI Summit, a flagship thought-leadership convening, and the formal launch of the Regenesys School of AI, a structured, long-term institutional commitment to building the artificial intelligence talent pipeline South Africa urgently needs.

The inaugural Regenesys AI Summit convenes executives from Microsoft, AWS, Cisco, Standard Bank, FNB, MTN, CSIR and more to confront the country's deepening AI skills deficit.

South Africa ranks consistently in the bottom third of global digital readiness indices. Local enterprises are adopting AI tools, but adoption without understanding is risk without reward. Organisations deploy AI into credit scoring, medical diagnostics, infrastructure monitoring and financial crime detection, and yet the country produces a fraction of the AI practitioners needed to govern, audit and improve those systems responsibly.

The consequences are severe.

Biased algorithms make lending decisions.

Unchecked automation displaces workers without reskilling pathways.

Cybersecurity frameworks lag years behind the threat landscape.

And South Africa's most talented technologists continue to emigrate to markets that value and reward their skills.

Dr Marko Saravanja, Chairperson of Regenesys Education, says:

"AI is not creating inequality in Africa. It is accelerating and exposing inequalities that were already there, in education, infrastructure, research capacity and governance.

The real divide is no longer simply access to technology.

It is access to thinking, skills, institutions and entrepreneurial culture.

What we are launching is a deliberate institutional response to that reality, built for the African context and focused on developing the capability Africa needs to compete.

At Regenesys, we have always believed that education must develop the whole person, not only as a professional, but as a thinker, leader and citizen.

The School of AI is a natural extension of that philosophy.

We are not interested in producing passive users of AI tools.

We are focused on developing people who can understand, build, govern and apply AI responsibly, with a clear grasp of its ethical, social and economic consequences in African conditions."

The Summit is structured as a working convening, drawing together c-suite executives, government representatives, academics and civil society to move past consensus and produce actionable outputs: skills frameworks, institutional partnerships and public commitments.

Keynotes will be heard from Muvhango Livhusha, Vice President and Deputy Board Chair, ISACA South Africa and Fred Salimane, Financial Crime Expert and Government Segment Compliance, SARS, Dr Nishal Khusial, Managing Partner AI Africa, Regenesys Education, Ayanda Ngcebetsha, Partner Development Director, Microsoft, Smangele Nkosi, General Manager and Country Leader, Cisco South Africa, and Ayanda Swana, CEO and Country Head, Siemens Healthineers South Africa.

The Summit's panel sessions will tackle questions the sector has been reluctant to answer directly:

Is South Africa's regulatory posture ready for AI at scale?

Who bears accountability when an AI system causes harm?

How do we build AI literacy across a population with deep digital access inequality?

The Regenesys School of AI is the event's lasting output and its true purpose.

Unlike short-form bootcamps or vendor certification programmes, the school is conceived as a dedicated academic institution that will develop AI practitioners, ethicists, policy thinkers and business leaders capable of deploying and governing AI in African conditions.

Dr Nishal Khusial, Managing Partner AI Africa at Regenesys, says:

"Africa cannot simply import AI solutions designed for Western infrastructure, Western data and Western regulatory contexts.

We need practitioners who understand load-shedding's effect on model deployment, who can work with fragmented health data, who know what responsible AI looks like in a country with our levels of inequality.

That is what this school will produce."

The school will offer structured programmes spanning AI fundamentals, machine learning engineering, AI governance and ethics, and applied AI across sectors including financial services, healthcare, and public administration.

Curricula will be co-developed with industry to ensure graduates are employment-ready from day one.

The institutions represented at this Summit, from major banks and insurers to the CSIR, SARS and the NICD, face genuine, near-term operational decisions about AI adoption that will affect millions of South Africans:

patients whose diagnoses are assisted by algorithms,

taxpayers whose compliance is assessed by machine learning,

workers whose performance is monitored by automated systems.

Getting this wrong is a social risk.

The Regenesys AI Summit is built on the conviction that the people best positioned to prevent those harms are the same people responsible for building the systems, and that they need a space to think, argue and commit.

Saravanja concludes:

“For too long, Africa has faced the risk of becoming a consumer of intelligence designed elsewhere, generating data while value is extracted in other markets.

That is not a sustainable future.

Regenesys is committed to building the talent, capability and confidence needed for Africa not only to keep pace with AI, but to help shape it, own more of its value, and use it to solve problems that matter on this continent.”

About Regenesys Education

Regenesys Education, established in 1997, is Africa’s largest private education institution, dedicated to providing world-class education in Business, Law, Education, Public Management, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Economics.

Committed to developing conscious leaders, Regenesys offers internationally recognised undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, as well as a range of professional and skills-based learning through its Digital Regenesys platform, Regenesys Skills Academy, and Corporate Education division.

For more information, visit https://www.regenesys.net.