I had the singular honour of being the keynote speaker at the Winfield Business School Alumni Summit 2026. The theme of this year’s Summit was “360 Degrees View of a Leader.”
The event explored leading with vision, integrity and lasting impact in a world changing faster than ever before.
The focus of my address was leadership in the age of AI, how you stay ahead when uncertainty and disruption are the new normal.
Readiness was the wrong frame for this conversation. Artificial Intelligence is not waiting for an invitation into Zimbabwean businesses.
It is already inside them, already shaping how reports get written and how decisions get made, and it arrived without anyone signing off on it.
That should give every leader pause, not because the technology itself is dangerous, but because anything that reshapes a business without anyone steering it usually ends up costing more than it saves.
There is a newsroom story that captures it best. When I started out as a young journalist, a single typewriter served an entire team.
You waited your turn, ideas scribbled on whatever scrap of paper was nearest, hoping to reach the machine before someone else’s patience ran out.
That typewriter did not slowly evolve into the computer that replaced it.
It simply disappeared, the way the printing press did not adapt itself to the internet but was overtaken by it.
Zimbabwe has lived a version of this story more than once.
Informal traders read the retail market the same way. They built parallel networks before the formal supply chains could catch up.
Mobile money won not because it was the cleverer technology, but because it answered a need faster than the banks did.
Value moves first. Institutions, if they move at all, move later.
Zimbabwe’s long history of surviving disruption can quietly curdle into the assumption that we will survive the next one too, without much effort.
AI is already past the stage where it was easy to dismiss. The only question left is whether you are in control of how it is being used inside your own business.
That same pattern is now running through AI adoption. Our own research, the Trevor and Associates AI Adoption in the Zimbabwean Workplace Survey, found that close to 90% of the businesses surveyed are already using AI tools in some form.
Fewer than half of them consider themselves ready for it. Most have no policy guiding how it should be used, and have done nothing in the way of structured training.
Yet in the same breath, the overwhelming majority of executives told us they are worried about data security, about misinformation, about misuse.
That is not a small gap between confidence and capability. It is a genuine disconnect, real power running through the business with almost nothing in place to direct it.
What actually changes is worth being precise about. The most immediate shift is efficiency.
It matters most in an environment like ours, where capital is limited and teams are lean enough that a few wasted hours genuinely threaten the month, not just the budget.
AI compresses that waste. A week of month-end reconciliation becomes a fraction of that.
A marketing team of two or three can operate with the output of a department twice their size.
The second shift is in how decisions get made. Zimbabwe’s economy does not give anyone the luxury of complete information.
Decisions get made under pressure, with partial pictures.
What AI offers there is not certainty but speed, a shorter gap between what is actually happening in the market and how quickly a business can respond to it.
The third is capability itself, and this is where the warning in the title gets concrete.
We have a well-documented shortage of specialised skills, and our own survey confirms that executives feel it acutely. AI does not erase that shortage so much as quietly absorb it.
The moment a junior analyst can produce work that once required a senior hire, a business has handed real judgement to a tool that nobody in the room fully understands.
That is not a footnote to the efficiency story. It is the same dynamic playing out at the level of capability that is playing out everywhere else: convenience arriving faster than anyone’s ability to control it.
At AMH and Trevor and Associates, this looked no different. We did not begin with a strategy either.
We began the way most businesses do, informally, without much coordination, without a shared sense of what exactly we were introducing into how we worked.
That is not a comfortable thing to admit, but it is true, and once we moved from that informal stage into something more structured, the difference was not gradual.
Productivity moved. The quality of our output moved. Our people started making faster, better-informed decisions almost immediately.
We are not where we want to be yet. But we are no longer where we started, and that distance, covered with intent rather than drift, is really the whole difference between leading a transformation and simply being carried along by it.
This is the part worth sitting with. Somewhere in the past twelve months, AI stopped being a tool that businesses might get around to adopting and became a force already shaping how their people think, decide and work.
Nobody asked permission. Nobody held a vote. You did not adopt AI so much as it adopted you, quietly, decision by decision, while leadership was looking elsewhere.
What remains genuinely open is what happens from here, whether that process is given direction, or left to keep shaping the business on its own terms.
The leaders who bring structure to it now will be the ones setting the pace for everyone else later.
The ones who wait will spend the next several years reacting to decisions that, in practice, have already been made for them.
That was the case I left the room with at the Winfield Business School Alumni Summit.
My sincere thanks go to Precious Murena-Nyika, CEO of Winfield Group, for the invitation to make it, and for the riveting conversations that the submissions and panels brought throughout the day.
*Trevor Ncube South African permanent resident and patriotic Zimbabwean chairman, Alpha Media Holdings. Founder, Trevor & Associates — trevorandassociates.com