At the CIO of the future summit held in Dar es Salaam in August, Sportpesa Tanzania CIO Godwin Mbekelu joked that he would want to work eight hours a day because in his field of work, IT professionals rarely have breaks. For Godwin, this is evidence that the IT department has evolved from being a back office function to a critical department that supports businesses to achieve their objectives.
Africa’s betting market has expanded rapidly over the past few years. As of 2026, the market is valued at $1.85 billion, and industry forecasts project it to reach $3.6 billion by 2029. That growth has brought a crowd of new operators into the space, making the industry highly competitive. Other than growth, the industry has also experienced a shift from paper betting to digital betting, which has fundamentally altered how technology departments operate. For IT professionals like Godwin Mbekelu, the consequence of this shift is that they have to work 24/7 because work “follows them everywhere”.
“We are in a very critical environment where uptime and system stability is very critical. The nature of our business is that our client does not wait for your system to come back. We have so many players in the market doing the same thing. Actually, if the platform does not work, they want to call it off and just go to the next competitor,” he said.
The shift has also changed how IT departments relate to the business function in organisations. Where tech teams once handled basic maintenance behind the scenes, they now sit closer to executive decisions.
“We are coming from the place where IT was to make sure that the servers and switches and the boxes are running. It's no longer a back office function, it is now to help the business reach its objectives. In our case, for example, we have a forum we call an IT business partnership, where we sit and discuss the business objective and see how technology can help,” he said.
AI best practices
In an environment where operations must stay running throughout, it is tempting to adopt tools like AI to make work easier. For Godwin, AI has transformed the way businesses work, especially through simplifying some of the processes. However, he warned IT departments not to delegate judgement to AI.
“AI is a tool not a decision maker. I am always telling my team that AI is helping us fast-track what we were supposed to do. Instead of running code or analyszing a log for 10 hours, you can use AI to do the analysis for two minutes, then make a decision. AI will help us fast-track the decision, but we remain accountable for making sure the outcome makes sense to the business,” he said.
A key element that he insisted on was to make sure that AI is trained to align with business outcomes.
“The trick is mostly to train the tool to be able to process the data that you have because with AI, it’s garbage in is garbage out. So the art of training the AI tool to be able to deliver the business outcome is a key parameter, especially on the technology side,” he said.
He further advised tech leaders to ensure that they put in place proper governance policies to ensure that human judgement is not overlooked even as organisations adopt AI. Further he advised them to ensure that employees are well trained on proper use while also paying attention to cybersecurity issues.
“The users using the tools need to understand what needs to be shared and what should not be shared, so we don't expose critical data to tools where at the end of the day we don't have much control over them. There is also the issue of cybersecurity while using AI tools.”
