Vodacom taps UJ, AWS to build its AI talent pipeline - Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub — Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub

Vodacom, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Amazon Web Services on Friday launched the Vodacom AI Lab, a partnership that puts postgraduate students to work on live industry problems – from cross-border fraud prevention to identity theft – using the same cloud and AI tools deployed by leading technology companies worldwide.

The lab’s research and development stream is already under way. Several UJ master’s students have been onboarded to work on research topics drawn directly from challenges Vodacom faces in its business, said Vodacom’s wholesale, fixed and enablement executive (and now AI lead) Johnny dos Santos.

One project is building a federated learning architecture for multi-country fraud prevention, investigating how mobile operators can identify and prevent fraud across markets without sharing sensitive customer information, using privacy-enhancing technologies. A second explores a blockchain-based approach to identity theft prevention, looking at how decentralised identity management can reduce the risk while improving verification and security.

“These projects represent more than academic exercises; they address critical challenges facing the industry today,” said Dos Santos. “They also demonstrate how emerging technologies such as AI, federated learning and blockchain can be applied to solve real-world problems.”

The students will not be working in a sandbox. “Our students will not study AI in theory. They will work on live Vodacom use cases running on real AWS infrastructure,” said Prabashni Naidoo, director at AWS in South Africa. “This is the kind of hands-on experience that until now took years to accumulate out of university.”

Through the lab, master’s and PhD students will build with AWS’s generative AI services and Amazon SageMaker, the company’s platform for building and training machine learning models. They will also use Amazon Quick, AWS’s AI assistant, and its AI-powered development tools, which Naidoo said would let students “move from an idea to building a working prototype at a pace that was not possible before”.

Anchor

The lab is housed in UJ’s College of Business and Economics, in the School of Consumer Intelligence and Information Systems, and draws on the university’s Centre for Applied Data Science, which has been placed in the department of information and knowledge management to anchor the initiative institutionally.

Prof Josef Langerman of UJ said the collaboration would do three things:

Lecturing and course content: Industry practitioners will contribute to lecturing and to driving course content on the centre’s programmes. “If you want to be a lecturer, now is your time,” he said.
Research: Vodacom brings the data, industry problems and supervision support that research requires. “What makes it even more exciting is to work with Amazon, who can give us some of the computing power.”
A long-term learning programme: A skills programme delivered through a digital learning platform UJ launched two years ago to make short courses available to anyone in the country.

“On almost all our PhDs, we have a professor driving it,” Langerman said. “The students come to work with these deep, seasoned academics.” All the centre’s programmes, he added, are lectured by PhD holders with deep industry knowledge.

Beyond the current research projects, the partnership plans joint short learning programmes, industrial placements and internships, capstone competitions, guest lectures and targeted research streams in professional degree programmes, said Prof Tankiso Moloi, executive dean of UJ’s College of Business and Economics. “Its success will not be measured only in research output, but in the quality of the research we accomplish, the indigenous solutions we develop and the world-class graduates who step out of our doors to lead the global AI revolution.”

Pipeline into Vodacom

For Vodacom, the lab doubles as a recruitment engine. Students will be exposed to the operator’s big data and AI teams and its processes, “with a clear objective of converting them into employees and eventually leaders”, said Matimba Mbungela, chief human resources officer at Vodacom Group.

Mbungela said the group would be intentional about gender diversity in a field that remains heavily male dominated. “We are building an AI workforce that reflects the diversity of Africa and also the diversity in the communities that we serve.” With Vodacom operating across eight markets, he said the UJ model could be replicated elsewhere, “creating a continental pipeline and community of professionals moving between our operations”.

Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub said the partnership was designed to close a longstanding gap. “For too long, universities have developed exceptional talent while industry searched for specialised AI and digital skills needed to keep growing,” he said. “Together, we are building a model for collaboration that connects education with industry, research with real-world applications and innovation with opportunity.”

Naidoo said the lab complements Vodacom’s Digital Skills Hub, through which the operator and partners including AWS offer free digital skills training to young people across eight African countries, part of Vodacom’s ambition to equip one million young Africans with digital skills. Where that programme is foundational, the lab targets advanced AI research and postgraduate-level, industry-ready capability. “One opens the door; the other takes those who walk through it deeper,” she said.

The lab itself, Naidoo added, “is not designed to be one of a kind; it is designed to be replicated. The talent pipeline created at UJ can become the blueprint for the continent.”