AWS - Smart Business Podcast

Tapas Mondal and Amit Pareek of RAKBANK on the future of banking in the Gulf: modernising the core, launching new propositions and experimenting with AI side by side, where architecture has to say no, and why safety sets the speed limit as AI agents change both fraud and customer service. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Dubai.

Carlotta Gagna (Traininpink), with Nothando Ntombela (AWS), on growing an Instagram page started on Christmas Day 2017 into a wellness app with nearly 50,000 members, choosing one method over being a full-service fitness app, and what remains the moat when any AI assistant can write a free workout plan. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Dubai.

Shobit Kohli (ONOV8 and EZMS), with Losika Monang (AWS), on replacing a 200-field application form with a WhatsApp conversation, letting AI check documents like board resolutions, building an "institutional brain" that remembers every decision, and weighing tokens against people and reputational risk. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Dubai.

Arjuna Nanayakkara and Thilina Uvindasiri (GTN), with Najath Hussain (AWS), on moving a live trading platform connected to more than 90 exchanges onto AWS without interrupting a customer, rebuilding it into five regional hubs with recovery proven in drills, and letting AI agents help run it. Rebuild or layer? Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Dubai.

Muhannad Al Alwani (maids.cc), with Mahmoud Alsafi (AWS), on running one of the most personal services there is through WhatsApp and an AI assistant instead of a website, where the assistant stops and a person takes over, and who owns the relationship once families arrive through their own AI assistants. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Dubai.

What you can count, you can protect. Willem Kellerman and Dirk Straus (Chisl Group), with Henri Zietsman (Silicon Overdrive), on using solar-charged drones, computer vision and AI to map 100,000 hectares of Sabi Sand and Timbavati in five days, and on what that kind of detail lets a reserve see, manage and protect. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Johannesburg.

Paul Jansen van Vuuren (Purple Group, EasyEquities) and Kirsten Hancock (Finch Technologies), with Deon Stroebel (LSD Open), on an 18-month rebuild compressed into a 3-day prototype, why the organisational 70 percent is still the hard part, and the meter that never stops once intelligence is priced per token. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Johannesburg.

Renier Lewis (TTS Talent) and Reshika Ramlal (OTpro), with Saireshan Govender (Blue Pearl), on how AI agents are renewing classic codebases in a fraction of the time they used to take, what that does to the business case for modernising, and where a human still has to sign off. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Johannesburg.

Arnold Pretorius and Felix McGregor of Saigen on training speech recognition for South Africa's languages when the flagship corpus holds around 56 hours per language and Whisper had 680,000: semi-supervised training, cross-lingual transfer, and finding GPUs on a continent short of them. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Johannesburg.

Thabiet Davids (JobZapp) and Tamuka Machakaire (Tyflex), with Oliver Downs (Cloud Bridge), on handing your thinking to a system: you lose control and you gain consistency. From AI-assisted vetting in Cape Town to Vekta, the commerce and fulfilment platform Tyflex is building for Zimbabwe. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Johannesburg.