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, and explained how he was addressing this.

He gave an example of one of the most common things he had to handle as mayor: requests for higher budgets for salaries.

While Hill-Lewis said he was really firm about refusing requests to avoid the city bureaucracy expanding, he has been accommodating requests that met one key condition over the last year.

“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,” Hill-Lewis said.

“I’m really trying to push the organisation up the AI hill, towards adoption. But that is probably going to be the biggest challenge, but I’ll get in there.”

Hill-Lewis believes the possibilities of AI are “endless,” which is why he has started sending all the city’s senior managers for regular AI training.

“Every four months, I meet our top 300 managers, and we have a training session on AI together. I’m sending all of them for training in there, you know, separately as well, and we are pushing them,” he said.

Hill-Lewis argued that there were opportunities to quickly solve issues in state institutions by using technology.

“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).

The system enables banks’ systems and staff to interface securely with Home Affairs’ systems to process applications for civic service documents, starting with smart IDs.