AVEVA’s EMEA Strategy Lead: Africa Is the Next Big Market
There is a version of the African technology conversation that treats the continent as a problem to solve later. AVEVA’s Jesus Hernandez is not interested in that version.
With the Senior Vice President for EMEA at AVEVA Day Johannesburg on April 23, 2026. The conversation covered AI, data infrastructure, the real barriers to industrial transformation in Africa, and why Africa sits at the centre of AVEVA’s growth strategy.
Hernandez was direct. AVEVA already works with major industrial operators across oil, gas, power, and mining, including Sasol, Eskom, Anglo American, Rio Tinto, and Glencore. Hundreds of millions of people across Africa still lack reliable energy access. As new infrastructure gets built to fix that, operators need software to run it efficiently. That is exactly the gap AVEVA fills.
He named three barriers blocking progress. Mindset comes first. Leaders increasingly understand why data and digital infrastructure matter, but the shift is still incomplete. Legacy systems come second. Older infrastructure makes integration more complex and slows adoption. Data comes third.
Every digital transformation depends on reliable, well-integrated data. AVEVA’s approach centres on what Hernandez calls the three I’s: integration, intuition, and intelligence. Systems must pull from multiple sources, stay genuinely usable, and then generate insights people can act on.
On AI, Hernandez stayed grounded. AI delivers real value in industrial environments today, especially for predictive maintenance and operational optimisation. But humans still make the decisions. AI supports them. And without a strong data infrastructure, AI produces nothing useful. That applies globally, not just in Africa.
AVEVA’s CONNECT platform ties the full asset lifecycle together, from feasibility and design through construction, operations, and optimisation. Cloud-based tools within the platform deploy in days. Organisations start generating and using data immediately without committing to a multi-year infrastructure build first. CONNECT runs on public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid environments, depending on data sovereignty needs, and integrates with providers including Microsoft Azure.
Hernandez described the skills challenge in Africa as a resource gap rather than a skills gap. The knowledge exists. There are simply fewer available experts than the number of transformation programs running at once. AVEVA addresses that through its global network of more than 5,000 system integrators and extensive online and on-site training programs.
The core argument is simple. Africa builds infrastructure now. The digital layer that runs that infrastructure, managing it and keeping it efficient, is where AVEVA plays. Building both layers at the same time is smarter than retrofitting the digital layer later.
