Nexus Intelligence on the Keynote Stage at Google Cloud Summit Africa

Google Cloud brought its Summit to African soil for the first time this year, filling the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg with more than 2,500 business leaders, developers and public-sector officials.

Against that backdrop, James Manyika, Senior Vice President for Research, Labs, Technology & Society at Google, named Nexus Intelligence from the keynote stage.

Google was not describing a customer. It was presenting a collaboration: a chest X-ray AI foundation developed with Google, engineered by Nexus into a certified medical device, and now running in national tuberculosis programmes across six countries.

Google has since named Nexus Intelligence again. On 15 September 2026, James Manyika's blog Building AI to accelerate science and improve lives cited the chest X-ray work used by Nexus Intelligence in its health section, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai shared the piece on LinkedIn. Read about the blog →

A tier-one AI foundation, developed with Google

In March 2023, Nexus Intelligence concluded a long-term Master Licence, Development and Commercialisation Agreement with Google LLC for chest X-ray artificial intelligence. To our understanding, only one other organisation in the world holds an agreement of this kind.

It is a development collaboration, not a software purchase. Nexus and Google set a joint milestone programme covering model transfer, validation, training-pipeline development, independent evaluation through the Stop TB Partnership and CE certification. Every milestone has been achieved. The underlying models were trained on approximately 460,000 chest radiographs from ten countries.

Nexus took that foundation and turned a research model into a regulated medical device. Nexus AI CXR runs two models on every image, a general lung health engine and a purpose-built tuberculosis detector, both within a single CE MDR Class IIb certification issued by TÜV SÜD under EU Regulation 2017/745. Nexus Intelligence is the legal manufacturer and owns the platform, the quality system and the certification.

Among the top-performing chest X-ray AI in the world

Performance in this field should be verified independently, not asserted by the manufacturer. Nexus AI CXR was evaluated in the Stop TB Partnership's external validation of twelve commercially available CAD products, conducted on the South African national tuberculosis prevalence survey against a composite microbiological reference standard and published in The Lancet Digital Health. Developers had no prior access to the images and no opportunity to train on them.

• → Second-highest area under the curve of all twelve, 0.897 (95% CI 0.872-0.922), statistically indistinguishable from the highest
• → Highest sensitivity of all twelve at the fixed operating threshold, 89.1% (84.7-92.7)
• → Of the products WHO subsequently recognised as meeting its performance standards, five were in this same study, Nexus outperformed four of them

Certified is not the same as deployed

Nexus AI CXR is deployed today with Ministries of Health in Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, across the first phase of South Africa's National Department of Health programme, with implementing partners including the Aurum Institute, and in mining and occupational health programmes across Southern Africa. It is quality-assessed for Global Fund financing and available through PFSCM / Wambo, the pooled procurement platform used in more than 100 countries.

The platform never has to phone home. It runs cloud, on-premise or hybrid, with full offline operation for sites with no connectivity, because a tool that depends on reliable internet would exclude the communities this work exists to serve. We tested that in March 2026, when Nexus AI CXR ran nearly four kilometres underground at Mponeng Gold Mine with Harmony Gold and the Stop TB Partnership.

The collaboration has since deepened: Nexus now works directly with Google Cloud, LLM-enabled functionality is integrated in Beta, and multi-pathology models covering silicosis and other findings are progressing through external validation. Under the Nexus and Google social impact commitment, more than 15,000 in-kind screenings have been delivered to underserved communities.

Two billion chest X-rays are taken worldwide each year and a very large proportion are never formally read. Closing that gap is the work. Johannesburg was a marker along the way.

About Nexus Intelligence

Nexus Intelligence is a South African medical technology company that has built, certified and deployed an AI platform for chest X-ray screening. Nexus AI CXR is a CE MDR Class IIb certified computer-aided detection solution for chest X-ray triage, developed under a long-term agreement with Google LLC and deployed across hospitals, mobile units and national screening programmes.

For more information on implementing AI-driven screening programmes, visit nexus-health.ai or contact info@nexus-health.ai.