Innovation

Mandla Mbonambi, Africonology

In 2025, Google’s Gemini app exceeded 650mn users a month. Since its launch two years ago, it has evolved from a platform capable of native multimodality with Gemini 1, to remarkable reasoning with Gemini 2 and Gemini 2.5, and Gemini 3’s ability to analyse nuanced conversation and data. The system offers developers, teams and companies a capable tool, but has yet to overtake its rival ChatGPT in downloads and popularity. Mandla Mbonambi, CEO of Africonology, and Dirk Steynberg, data engineering specialist at Synthesis Software Technologies, give their views on why they opted for Gemini as their GenAI tool.

“We’ve been researching AI solutions and evaluating the different LLMs in the market to best understand how we can use and implement them with our customers,” says Mbonambi. “The best proving ground is to use it ourselves. With Gemini, we explored how it could assist with scenario-planning around our new projects, teams and resources for the year.”