Arthur Goldstuck Brings The African Edge To CIO100 2026

Arthur Goldstuck will deliver the keynote at the CIO100 Symposium 2026 in Diani, Kenya.

Set for 25 November 2026, Goldstuck, the founder and CEO of World Wide Worx, the South African research firm measuring how technology actually gets used on the continent and author of 21 books will launch the Symposium into high gear with his keynote. Six of his books are about South African urban legends, which says a lot about how he thinks: he has spent a career separating what people believe from what is true. He also publishes the online consumer technology magazine Gadget.co.za, and with his weekly column as the most widely syndicated technology column in South Africa.

“I gave a keynote at the first East African Internet Conference in 1996, and the region’s technology community has been teaching me ever since. I said yes because CIO100 brings together the people who will decide whether Africa builds its own AI advantage or rents someone else’s. I want every delegate to leave knowing where their own organisation’s edge lies, and what they must do to make sure nobody else captures it,” says Arthur Goldstuck, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI: The African Edge.

Capturing The Key Moments For Africa 

Goldstuck’s insights have always crested with the technological wave, capturing the moments in his series of books. He watched the dotcom boom arrive in this market, then mobile, then social, then big data, then blockchain. When someone who has watched several cycles come and stay in the African market and has the receipts, it piques one’s curiosity. His 1995’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet: A South African Handbook was South Africa’s best-selling IT book. It explained a new technology to a continent that was being sold a great deal of nonsense about it. It was followed by 2005’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Going Wireless, 2007’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Going Mobile, 2023’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI and his latest book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI: The African Edge published in July 2025.

Built off Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which begun as a radio series in 1978 and became a sci-fi comedy novel in 1979, the references keep working. In Adams’s novel, the Guide is a handheld device you can ask a question and it answers. What does that sound like in 2026? And the Galaxy got a fictional Guide with the words Don’t Panic emblazoned on its cover albeit in large, friendly letters. Goldstuck’s series comes armed with the exact promise a reader wants from a book about a technology they feel behind on.

Hitchhiker’s Guide Through The Technological Plains 

As for the hitchhiker, they are no pilot or the engineer. What they are is a passenger crossing other people’s territory, travelling light and getting by wits alone. This is how most of us experience a new technology. Goldstuck, a journalist and a researcher, reinforces our hitchhiking through the technological world, each new guide in the series explaining the complex to the ordinary. Plenty of writers have used The Hitchhiker’s Guide on their book titles, but Goldstuck’s have well, stuck and resonated decade later for the continent.

The publisher’s synopsis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To AI: The African Edge opens with three questions: “Did you know that AI helped South Africa to win the 2023 Rugby World Cup? That Africa led the way in small language models? That AI has been supporting farmers in Kenya for the last decade?”

When Africa got the internet, Africa never got ownership of it. Instead, we rented the cables, the cloud, the platforms and the data centres. It would be fair to say we are still paying that rent. The question now is whether AI goes the same way, and whether anyone in a position to change it is paying attention.

The African Advantage 

Goldstuck’s keynote, The African Edge: From AI Adoption to African Advantage asks that almighty question: how can African organisations move beyond consuming tools built somewhere else, and start using what they actually have such as their own data, their languages, their operating conditions, right down to their knowledge of markets no one else understands, all to build something that is theirs.

Harry Hare, Chairman and Co-Founder, CIO Africa by dx5, the organisers of the event said, “We are delighted to have Arthur Goldstuck join us for the CIO100 Symposium & Awards 2026. His session will remain true to his insights and current work while giving the CIO100 audience a practical leadership agenda.”

World Wide Worx runs primary research in African markets. Their insights delve into what people actually buy, what businesses actually deploy, to how fast things actually move. Meanwhile, the African tech leader is drowning in global analyst reports calibrated to other markets alongside vendor content that counts as insight. But Goldstuck can speak to what he has measured.

He is, in essence, a translator. The CIOs hardest problem is often rarely ever the technology. Instead, it is explaining the technology to a board and a CFO who control the money. Goldstuck hands CIOs clear language for that conversation from a continental vantage point that grants relevance and gives perspective.

He will examine where Africa already has an advantage in AI. He will get into what is now the highest-level conversation. How will CIOs get from pilots to numbers that a board will recognise and resonate with? We anticipate that the room will be left pondering where their organisation’s African advantage lies, and just how AI can amplify it. That, in turn, will ensure each technology leader in the room captures their unique advantage.

Delegates, who can register here, will no doubt enjoy Goldstuck’s decades-long storytelling gleaned from years of being a prolific author, journalist and columnist. His curated cases are unmistakably singular, drawn from his access to teachers, coders, executives and artists across Africa, the Middle East, Europe, North America and Asia.

The CIO100 Symposium brings together the technology leaders from across the continent, including those recognised on the CIO100 list. It runs from 25 to 27 November at Diamonds Leisure Beach & Golf Resort, Diani, Kenya.