South African telecom giant Telkom has always been a company with bold ambitions. Starting in the 2000s, Telkom’s identity as a parastatal supplier of fixed-line critical infrastructure presented challenges when mobile usage in the country took off. “We were almost a decade behind when mobile technology surged,” explains Dr. Noxolo Kubheka-Dlamini, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Telkom Consumer & Small Business. “By the time we entered the mobile space in 2010, the market was already saturated.”
Nevertheless, Telkom overcame early challenges, becoming South Africa’s third-largest mobile service provider within a decade. Now, it serves over 23 million mobile subscribers alongside its fixed broadband customers. The company expanded its offerings beyond traditional telecom services, having previously operated Yellow Pages through its Trudon subsidiary. That then became fully integrating it into Telkom’s core operations. Telkom also launched the TelkomONE streaming platform in partnership with the SABC, which was later transferred to the SABC and rebranded as SABC+. These moves, along with diversification into content and financial services, helped position Telkom as a true digital player in the market by the early 2020s, explains Kubheka-Dlamini.
Driving Digital Acceleration
Having joined Telkom in November of 2023, Kubheka-Dlamini is playing an instrumental role in overcoming those challenges. Her goal quickly became guiding Telkom on the next stage of its journey to unlock shareholder value.
She is helping align an approach that is AI and cloud-first, customer-centric, and digitally driven. “Telkom is at an exciting place in its journey, exploiting the power of digital technologies to better serve its customers,” she says. Thanks to a combination of existing infrastructure and ongoing digital acceleration, Telkom is playing a pivotal role in ensuring access to meaningful connectivity. This is cemented by the company’s vision to become South Africa’s digital backbone: bridging the digital divide and enabling inclusive participation in its digital economy.
Kubheka-Dlamini’s career has moved throughout complex and heavily regulated sectors, including financial services, mining, and transport. She reached her first CIO role in 2014. She has spent the years since guiding organisations through complex, challenging digital transformations driven by data, AI, and automation. However, she is always focused on business outcomes. “I’ve always seen technology not as the end goal, but as a lever,” says Kubheka-Dlamini. “It should enable operational efficiency, customer centricity, and ultimately strategic repositioning for sustainable growth.”
Tackling Transformations
During her tenure at Telkom, Kubheka-Dlamini has led three strategic, high-impact transformation projects in rapid succession. Each of them delivered measurable outcomes thanks to her talent for uniting multidisciplinary teams behind a shared digital vision. It’s a skill, she explains, developed over years of driving transformation. This was built across disparate environments, blending deep industry knowledge with a pragmatic, agile leadership style. Her approach is built on a foundation of modern, open architecture and system modernisation. “We’ve moved aggressively embracing cloud-native tools, modernising legacy systems, unlocking unified data across platforms,” she notes. “We’ve also pioneered new API models, B2B2C monetisation paths, and partner integration frameworks.”
A strong advocate for AI-infused operations and services, Kubheka-Dlamini believes automation is not just about cost savings; it’s about freeing teams to do more meaningful work. “AI brings not just efficiency, but effectiveness. It lets people focus on higher-value tasks and innovate faster. That’s where real value is created.”
