Geordin Hill-Lewis won't grant Cape Town departmental management additional budget for salaries unless they implement AI

mylesillidge

mylesillidge

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Cape Town's mayor has one interesting condition for salary increases

City of Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said he wouldn’t grant the metro's departmental managers' additional budget for salaries unless they implemented artificial intelligence (AI) in their operations.

Speaking at the BizNews Conference on Tuesday, 11 August 2026, Hill-Lewis gave feedback on what he thought would be the biggest challenge in making Cape Town an AI-enabled city.
 
"Hill-Lewis said he anticipated leadership adoption of the tech would be the biggest hurdle to overcome..."

Oh dear, dear mayor marshmallow...

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“I’ve said I will not even consider a salary proposal or request that comes to me unless you can demonstrate how you are introducing AI adoption and automation in your department,”

Slop for the sake of slop.

"Hill-Lewis believes the possibilities of AI are “endless,”

This is what happens if you binge one too many self promotional tech-bro interviews on Joe Rogan and you think you've found the thing that has the answer. LLM usage as a requirement for service delivery is ridiculous.
 
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PlanesTrainsAutomobiles said:
Do not understand why y'all have an issue with this
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Pushing LLM slop for the sake of having LLM slop with no clear directive or adoption plan - that has clear, beneficial, deliverables - is a time-waste of note and any management twerp doing so needs to be smacked until they stop.

There is nothing magical in LLM land. Forcing its use - or as the saying now goes, "tokenmaxxing" - is destructive noise for no good reason.

Why do you *not* have an issue with this?
 
mylesillidge said:
Cape Town's mayor has one interesting condition for salary increases

City of Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said he wouldn’t grant the metro's departmental managers' additional budget for salaries unless they implemented artificial intelligence (AI) in their operations.

Speaking at the BizNews Conference on Tuesday, 11 August 2026, Hill-Lewis gave feedback on what he thought would be the biggest challenge in making Cape Town an AI-enabled city.
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Does he probably think AI and API is one and the same ? :unsure:
“I think [Minister] Leon Schreiber is showing at Home Affairs that in some institutions, there is an opportunity for technology to short-circuit that,” he said.

Home Affairs has increased the number of bank branches that support smart ID card renewals more than tenfold in five months through an application programming interface (API).
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rustypup said:
Pushing LLM slop for the sake of having LLM slop with no clear directive or adoption plan - that has clear, beneficial, deliverables - is a time-waste of note and any management twerp doing so needs to be smacked until they stop.

There is nothing magical in LLM land. Forcing its use - or as the saying now goes, "tokenmaxxing" - is destructive noise for no good reason.

Why do you *not* have an issue with this?
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One of our clients started on this path recently and got a rude awakening when tokens were exhausted in no time. LOL. Only couple of people (architect & some senior devs) have access to consume tokens now and that too after approval from top.

This token thing is going to be costly in my opinion, even if it seems cheap in the beginning.
 
AlmightyBender said:
Sigh. This is the day the city I have lived in my whole life and loved enough that I have never considered moving dies. This is the worst idea I've heard in a long time. I grew up with Geordin and went to school and university with him and this is just sad and disappointing.
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What is sad and disapponting?
 
RedViking said:
Agree. South Africa should be run by AI, not dictators.
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The big problem behind AI is that the policies and processes in using AI are weak. This is a management problem, starting at the top.

Also, nobody seems to know how to solve issues created by AI other than throwing more AI at the problem.

People aren't trained. Neither do they know how to prompt or vet the output. AI users assume that AI is the truth bearer. I have seen these issues prop up in reporting and all other documentation. I can't speak to all applications. Frameworks suck, and most employees are given prompt templates or that what is limited to the chatbot build into whatever suite they are using.

We have even seen legal cases being thrown out due to unskilled AI use.

Sure, blame hallucinations, but it is a human problem that lacks due diligence.

AI is such a common word in business now. So much garbage is automated.

I do pity the city, but then again, perhaps AI will hallucinate less than the politicians.

Seeing as GHL is named in the headline I do expect him to respond in this all being misleading as per usual.
 
Sideshow Bob said:
One of our clients started on this path recently and got a rude awakening when tokens were exhausted in no time. LOL. Only couple of people (architect & some senior devs) have access to consume tokens now and that too after approval from top.

This token thing is going to be costly in my opinion, even if it seems cheap in the beginning.
Click to expand...

I read an article that mentioned that only around 25% of enterprises currently track token usage in real time, and that cost shocks are happening all the time.

Although the article was probably AI generated and accordingly wildly inaccurate.
 
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