by Giselle Sari Botha, Community Manager at Innovation City

What happens when a group of leaders from one of Africa’s largest banks steps out of the corporate environment and into a room with entrepreneurs and technologists actively experimenting with the future of work?

You get questions. Lots of them!

That was exactly what we hoped for when participants from Standard Bank Group CIB’s SOAR Programme recently spent an afternoon at Innovation City.

SOAR is a six-month experiential leadership programme designed to empower female leaders. Built around the principles of Courage, Confidence and Hunger to Win, the programme develops skills ranging from personal mastery and networking to strategic intelligence, resilience and career management. Its immersion component includes Creative Confidence and AI Confidence, which created a natural opportunity to connect the cohort with Innovation City’s tech community.

At Innovation City, we often talk about creating the conditions for growth by getting the right people into the same room. So rather than talking about innovation and AI, we invited four of our members to share what implementing it actually looks like inside their businesses.

Pomodor kicked things off by taking AI from the theoretical to the practical, demonstrating how AI agents can become part of everyday workflows - from gathering information across systems to preparing weekly management reports. Importantly, the conversation wasn't simply about what AI can do, but where human judgement, permissions, governance and guardrails still need to remain.

Plan.Net CreativeNest South Africa offered a different perspective from the creative industry. One observation particularly stood out: as AI becomes louder in the outside world, it is becoming “quieter” inside their workflows, increasingly integrating into the tools creatives already use. The team also demonstrated how two designers, with no developer, used specialised AI agents to help build a digital project in roughly three days.

Then Octoco showed why AI adoption doesn't belong exclusively to technical teams. Their Talent Manager shared how she used Claude to create an AI-assisted career-development process, while maintaining human checkpoints along the way.

Finally, Nineteen58 brought customer-facing AI into the conversation, demonstrating conversational voice and messaging agents that maintain context across channels. Their presentation prompted particularly interesting discussions around whether customers trust AI, how transparent businesses should be about its use, and when an interaction should be handed back to a human.

And then came the Q&A.

How do you measure the actual ROI of AI? How do you control what an agent can access? How do businesses keep pace when the technology changes almost daily? What happens to junior skills? Will AI replace jobs or change them? And how do we build trust while moving quickly enough not to be left behind?

The questions continued well beyond the presentations, which was perhaps the best measure of the afternoon’s success.

Because Innovation City isn't simply about providing desks or hosting events. It is about creating an environment where corporates, founders and innovators can meet, challenge one another, exchange knowledge and discover opportunities that might not have existed before they entered the room.

Sometimes innovation starts with technology.

Sometimes it starts with a really good question.

And sometimes, it simply starts by making the right introduction.