Features
The FOMO tax
GenAI budgets are growing fast, but most organisations still cannot tell you what they got back for the money.
08 May 2026
Somewhere between the board presentation and the invoice, something goes wrong. The AI licences get bought, the infrastructure is provisioned and the announcement goes out. And then, as advisors to some of South Africa’s largest organisations keep seeing, six months later, a fraction of employees are using the new GenAI tool daily, and nobody can explain what the business actually got for its money. The problem is rarely the technology, but the thinking that preceded it. This is playing out across organisations of every size and sector as GenAI moves from curiosity to line item. McKinsey estimated that 78% of organisations were using AI in at least one business function in 2025, yet according to a new BCG study, only 5% of companies are achieving AI value at scale.
The gap between adoption and value is not a coincidence. Francois van der Merwe, founder and CEO of Otinga.io, says it’s the direct result of organisations skipping the fundamentals, and the fundamentals have nothing to do with which model you choose or with which vendor you sign.
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