Mr Tshepo Mashilo

Tshepo Mashilo
Chief Executive Officer, Brillion · Former Group CIO

Tshepo Mashilo is a South African technology executive who has spent more than two decades helping large, complex organisations get more out of their systems and their data. He began his career writing software and today leads Brillion; a company he founded to build practical artificial intelligence and automation tools.

In between, he held chief information officer roles in healthcare administration and pan-African telecommunications, responsible for technology strategy, governance and large-scale modernisation. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Pretoria and a Master of Business Leadership from the UNISA School of Business Leadership and has since completed executive programmes at Harvard Business School and MIT.

Academic journey and qualifications

Tshepo's academic path began with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Pretoria. It gave him the technical grounding that shaped the first decade of his career. But as he took on more senior roles, he saw that technology on its own rarely changes an organisation — the harder questions were about strategy, money, risk, people, and how decisions actually get made.

The Master of Business Leadership at the UNISA School of Business Leadership, completed in 2017, was the turning point. It gave him the frameworks and the confidence to operate as an executive rather than a specialist: to connect a technology agenda to the wider business and to hold his own in the boardroom. He has kept learning since — the Senior Executive Programme – Africa at Harvard Business School and two quantum computing programmes at MIT, all in 2024, alongside CIO Professional Practice at Wits.

Career highlights and achievements

Tshepo started out as a software developer at Momentum Life before moving into consulting at Accenture, where he worked on telecommunications billing and process re-engineering projects in South Africa and abroad. Over the following years at Cell C, MTN and Vodacom he went deeper into the engine room of the telecoms industry — billing systems, product architecture, enterprise integration and business intelligence. At Vodacom he built the business intelligence capability from the ground up, and the revenue assurance reporting he developed was used by the company's forensic teams to uncover internal fraud.

His move into executive leadership came through CIO roles at DV8 Technology Group, 3Sixty Health and Seacom. At 3Sixty Health, a medical scheme administrator serving roughly 75,000 principal members and over 150,000 beneficiaries, he owned the digital strategy for six years — modernising core systems, strengthening security and governance, and moving the call centre onto cloud telephony. That last move proved its worth when COVID-19 hit: the business could keep serving members while its people worked from home.

As Group CIO at Seacom, the pan-African fibre and connectivity provider, he led technology across eight markets. He inherited a sprawling estate and simplified it hard — cutting the number of operational support systems from 98 to fewer than 30, consolidating two separate Salesforce environments into one, and standing up a Programme Management Office and a Risk & Compliance Office from scratch. He also built a modern data platform and a revenue assurance model that reconciled the services Seacom was actually delivering against what it was billing, surfacing leakage and recovering revenue.

In 2025 he founded Brillion, where he is now chief executive. The company builds AI and automation products that help organisations turn their data into decisions they can trust and act on quickly — work that pulls together the whole of his earlier career: systems, data, governance and a clear sense of what technology is actually for. Its current flagship project is the modernisation of a health administration platform, replacing ageing systems with a cloud-based, AI-enabled one.

Professional growth and leadership

The thread running through Tshepo's career is a shift from solving technical problems to solving organisational ones. Early on, success meant building a system that worked. Later it meant building the strategy, the teams and the governance that let technology deliver real value — and being able to explain all of it to a board.

He is candid that his most lasting lessons have had little to do with technology itself. Transformation, in his experience, succeeds or fails on trust, clarity and disciplined execution far more than on the tools involved. He is wary of hype: a new technology only earns its place when it solves a painful problem and can scale into something repeatable. And he argues that good governance — often seen as a brake on innovation — is exactly what makes innovation safe enough to scale.

His advice to current SBL students reflects that. Treat the qualification as more than a credential, he says — use it to change how you think and how you decide. Technical skill and ambition open doors, but it is leadership maturity that determines how far you can go.