THE technology tsunami that decimated the print media industry is now headed for banking, insurance, law, accounting and property.
The difference this time is the speed and the punch.
What took the internet 15 years to do to newspapers, artificial intelligence will do to the professions in a fraction of that time.
And unlike the slow bleed of print circulation, AI does not erode revenue gradually.
It arrives and entire categories of work vanish.
I write this not as a commentator but as someone who has lived through every stage of digital destruction.
Keep Reading
- Time running out for SA-based Zimbos
- Sally Mugabe renal unit disappears
- Epworth eyes town status
- Commodity price boom buoys GB
As chairman of Alpha Media Holdings, which publishes NewsDay, The Standard and The Zimbabwe Independent, and as the longest-serving controlling shareholder of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian from 2002 to 2017, I watched the collapse of classified advertising, the migration of readers to free online platforms, the haemorrhaging of circulation, and the agonising reinvention that follows when your entire business model is rendered obsolete.
In South Africa, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported a 17% year-on-year drop in newspaper circulation in 2024.
Two historic titles, the 125-year-old Pretoria News and the nearly eighty-year-old Weekend Post, simply ceased to exist.
The Mail & Guardian itself, one of Africa’s most celebrated newspapers, has been battered by the same forces.
What was once unthinkable became inevitable.
Throughout those years, executives in banking, insurance, property and wealth management watched our struggles with sympathy and detachment.
They read about our layoffs in the very newspapers we were fighting to keep alive.
Some offered unsolicited advice.
But not once did most of them consider that the same tidal force drowning journalism was creeping towards their own front doors.
Here is the cruel irony: when a newspaper lays off staff, it becomes a headline.
Our pain is documented in the open.
But when a bank quietly automates its back office, when an insurance company reduces claims staff, when a property firm replaces agents with algorithms, the silence is deafening.
Last week, Wall Street witnessed an indiscriminate sell-off that should concentrate the mind of every white-collar professional in Zimbabwe and beyond.
When Anthropic released new AI automation tools targeting legal, financial and data analysis work, approximately US$285 billion in market capitalisation was wiped out in a single trading day.
The S&P 500 software and services index fell nearly 9% over five sessions.
Thomson Reuters crashed over 20%.
Salesforce is down 26% for the year.
Then came Altruist, a startup whose AI-powered tax planning tool, Hazel, can read a client’s tax returns and account statements and generate fully personalised tax strategies in minutes.
Wealth management stocks tumbled.
Insurify’s AI-powered insurance platform hammered broker stocks so badly that Willis Towers Watson suffered its worst trading session since 2008.
Real estate firms CBRE and Jones Lang LaSalle plunged 12% each.
The market sent an unmistakable message: no industry built on knowledge work is safe.
The signals are everywhere.
Last week Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI chief, told the Financial Times that lawyers, accountants, marketers and project managers will see most of their tasks “fully automated” within 12 to 18 months.
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could displace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.
Spotify’s co-CEO revealed that the company’s best developers have not written a single line of code since December.
When the people building AI cannot predict its trajectory, what chance does a Zimbabwean insurance broker or wealth manager have of staying ahead of it?
Let me bring this home. Consider our banking sector. CBZ Holdings, the country’s largest banking group. Stanbic Bank. FBC Bank. NMB. Ecobank. Nedbank Zimbabwe. First Capital Bank. CABS.
These institutions derive an outsized share of their income from fees and commissions — 22% of total banking income, according to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.
That model depends on human intermediation: tellers processing transactions, relationship managers advising clients, back-office staff reconciling accounts.
When a business owner in Harare can open an account, transfer funds, and receive investment advice through a single AI-powered platform, the branch network becomes an expensive relic.
The insurance industry faces an equally existential reckoning.
Old Mutual, First Mutual, Zimnat, NicozDiamond, Nyaradzo Life — household names built on armies of agents and brokers who serve as information intermediaries between clients and underwriters.
Every single one of those tasks — risk assessment, policy comparison, claims processing, renewals — is now automatable.
It requires only a smartphone and an internet connection, the broker who offers nothing beyond policy processing will be redundant.
Then there are the professions we have long considered untouchable.
Law firms — Gill, Godlonton & Gerrans, Scanlen & Holderness, Wintertons, Dube Manikai & Hwacha, Atherstone & Cook — whose junior associates spend thousands of hours on document review, contract drafting and due diligence that AI can now complete in seconds.
The Big Four accounting firms operating here — Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, EY — and local practices whose audit and tax advisory work involves precisely the pattern recognition and compliance checking that AI was built to do.
Property valuers and estate agents whose local market knowledge is being replicated by AI systems that analyse real-time transaction data, satellite imagery and demographic trends continuously.
Morgan Stanley estimates US$34 billion in efficiency gains for real estate alone by 2030.
Is Zimbabwe ready? The honest answer is no.
And the tempting argument that AI disruption is a first-world problem — that our low internet penetration and informal economy will insulate us — is precisely the thinking that led newspaper executives to dismiss the internet in 2005.
AI disruption does not require local AI development.
It requires only that clients have alternatives.
The disruption is imported through the internet, the same way it was imported to our newsrooms.
Twenty years of digital disruption in media taught me four lessons.
First, denial is the most expensive strategy.
Every year a newspaper spent insisting print was not dying was a year it could have spent building digital capacity.
Second, disruption moves faster than you expect.
Revenue erosion was slow and manageable for years, then catastrophic in months.
Third, the survivors redefine their value proposition.
Fourth, entry-level jobs disappear first.
Stanford research confirms that AI has already reduced entry-level employment in exposed occupations by 13%.
The articled clerks at Harare’s law firms, the graduate trainees at the Big Four, the junior analysts at CBZ and Stanbic — these are the roles that will be hollowed out first.
So what must Zimbabwean companies do?
Stop treating AI as a future problem and start treating it as a present reality.
Every bank, insurer, law firm and accounting practice should be conducting an honest audit of which roles and processes are automatable — not in five years, but today.
Invest in AI literacy at executive and board level.
Pilot AI tools in back-office functions now, before competitors or start-ups do it for you.
Redefine your value proposition around the things AI cannot do: trust, empathy, judgement, complex problem-solving and deep client relationships.
The wealth manager who survives will be the one who provides counsel that algorithms cannot replicate, not the one delivering faster portfolio analysis.
The insurance broker who thrives will become a genuine risk adviser.
The lawyer who endures will be the one whose strategic counsel and courtroom presence cannot be scraped from a database.
And what must talent do?
If you are a young professional in Zimbabwe’s financial, legal or professional services sectors, understand this: the entry-level job you trained for may not exist in three years.
Learn to work with AI, not against it.
Develop the skills that sit above automation — critical thinking, creative problem-solving, relationship management and ethical judgement.
The professionals who thrive will be those who use AI as a tool to amplify their expertise, not those who compete with it on tasks it will always perform faster and cheaper.
Government has a role to play too. Zimbabwe needs a coherent national AI strategy that addresses digital infrastructure, data governance, skills development and regulatory adaptation.
Policymakers must create the enabling environment — affordable broadband, updated curricula, and regulatory sandboxes — that allows local firms to adopt and adapt AI rather than simply be displaced by it.
Fifteen years ago, a senior banking executive in Harare told me, with genuine sympathy, that he was sorry about what was happening to newspapers.
“But at least in banking,” he said, “people will always need a human being to trust with their money.”
I wonder what he thinks now, as AI-powered platforms manage trillions in assets and startups like Altruist generate personalised tax strategies faster than his best employees can open a spreadsheet.
Not to mention the impact of Bitcoin and crypto.
A lawyer friend once told me nobody wanted to invest in media.
I wonder what he thinks as he works through the manual files that AI can scan in seconds.