AWS - Smart Business Podcast

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.

Martina Venter (Hollard Court Bonds) and Nelson Sithole (EKS Vehicle Tracking), with Danie du Plessis (Fuse IT), on a regulated bond process that ran on spreadsheets and a tracking business that ran on rented software, and on why building and owning your own platform is no longer the slow, expensive option it used to be. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Johannesburg.

Rowan Potgieter (SA Home Loans) and Keenen Moodley (Rewardsco), with Jonathan Oaker (CloudZA), on why the bottleneck is no longer the model but the data, platforms and governance underneath it, and whether a 27-year-old business can leapfrog or only a startup can. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Johannesburg.

Mitch Voskuilen (Billy Grace), with Albert Argenté Nordbeck (AWS), on what's still the marketer's job once AI distributes the budget and makes the creative, and whether "creativity comes back" is a real future or a comforting story. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Frederick Ryckbosch (Aikido Security), with Albert Argenté Nordbeck (AWS), on what happens when the same AI both writes the code and writes the fix, and how small a team can get while still shipping secure software at startup speed. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Maximiliano Neustadt (Polarsteps), with Tarek Mahmoud (AWS), on what is the best strategy against the big AI companies when it comes to helping people plan their trips in authentic ways.

Ivan Tsenov (Iris.ai), with Kristina Cekanauskaite (AWS), on how a 2015-era deep-tech company stays specifically valuable in a 2026 AI market that re-prioritises every quarter, and whether the roadmap is steered by market signal or by technical conviction. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Ken Bastiaensen (Ravical), with Veronica Ostring (AWS), on whether the next frontier is a smarter junior at every desk or organizational AI that rewires how a whole expert firm works, and whether that's a real product category or features the foundation models will absorb. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Prash Somaiya (Hadrian), with Aura Villamizar (AWS), on how much autonomy you hand an AI agent inside your own perimeter, and whether the next decade of defence is won by buying more controls or by continuously attacking yourself faster than anyone outside can. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

George Yianni (Philips Hue, Signify) and Marshall van Beurden (myTomorrows) on turning a decade of domain expertise into effortless natural language for non-experts, and where specialist value has to live to stay defensible as the AI giants go vertical themselves. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Vipul Hingne (Booking.com), Michiel Maandag (Bynder) and Jana Werner (AWS), co-author of The Octopus Organization, on what AI is doing to the shape of an organisation, and whetherthis upheaval is a phase to manage through or the new form leaders have to build their companies into. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Rob Spekschoor (Dustin) and Arwin Scholten (EDSN), with Pelin Dumans (AWS), on running AI on top of infrastructure the rest of the economy depends on, and what responsible speed really means: when do you ship, and when do you brake on time? Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Han Stoffels (8vance) and Sabine van Hoijweghen (Secutec), with Alexandra Tofan (AWS), on building AI that matches people to meaningful work and AI that keeps the digital economy safe,and how, despite all the risks AI brings, we can steer toward a world that is both secure and full of meaningful work for people. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Jeroen Meulendijks (SpecifAi) and Friso Geerlings (iO Digital), with Amer Grgić (AWS), on why AI is forgiving where business intelligence never was, the real worth of a prototype anyone canbuild in five minutes, and who is responsible for saying an answer is good enough to ship. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Michiel van der Deijl (Condoor), Maarten Bode (Zonneplan) and Jeroen Jacobs (Cloudar, on AWS co-host duty) on building a lot yourself while buying the rest from AWS, where that build-buyline moves next, and what it does to the guardrails around an AI talking to 220,000 customers. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Luc Brandts (SIG) and Jelle Visser (BlueDolphin), with Vinicius Spader Paganin (AWS), on what happens to control when thousands of AI agents start writing the code, and whether governance begins bottom-up in the verified code or top-down in the architecture blueprint. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Amsterdam.

Philip Borge (Crunched) and Alexander Engl (AWS Startups) on how a tightly scoped tool for financial analysts grew into an AI workflow platform for banks, Big-Four transaction advisory and management consultancies, and what that journey teaches founders about earning trust before expanding. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Stockholm.

Björn Blomqvist (Axfood) and Kellen O'Connor (AWS) on how a thin-margin grocery retailer stacks classical machine learning, generative AI and agentic experiments, and when efficiency stops being enough and the next gain has to come from the in-store moment. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Stockholm.

Hans Skovgaard (Queue-it) and Jasmine Chua (AWS) on redesigning the gatekeeper for an agentic web, where shopping agents arrive at scale, intent matters more than identity, and trust certificates may become the new currency of access. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Stockholm.

Victor Botev (Iris.ai) and Kristina Cekanauskaite (AWS) on a decade of making the world's hardest scientific text understandable to machines, and which of today's design choices, from smaller domain-specific models to teams of agents working together, will still hold up two years from now. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Stockholm.

Erik Kjellström (Syncron) and Marc Cervera Castro (AWS) on how AI is moving OEMs from forecasting yesterday's demand to orchestrating tomorrow's uptime, pricing and warranty as one connected system. Recorded live at the AWS Summit in Stockholm.