In this episode of ITWeb TV, John Kamara, CEO & Founder, AI Centre of Excellence, discusses tackles Africa’s evolving AI landscape, how the continent must ignore the global “hype train” and focus on localised, relevant solutions to bridge the knowledge divide and create jobs. To achieve this, he says that AI must be used to transform education and that corporates must support local startups to foster innovation and job creation.
The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) is causing organisations to overlook the value of their people, missing business opportunities, and, without clear strategic thinking, it will worsen employment prospects for Africans.
In the latest episode of ITWeb TV, John Kamara, founder and CEO, AI Centre of Excellence, said a lot of the international hype around AI means African business leaders are adopting the technology simply for the sake of it and for a fear of missing out, and in so doing are lacking clear strategic focus.
Having run workshops with over 200 C-level business leaders, Kamara said he’s seeing the same trend repeating, a failure to recognise AI as an enabler thus making people the strategic differentiator.
“I couldn’t get CEOs to think past ‘we’re using ChatGPT’…so I started running these workshops for C-level executives to understand, first, how they think about AI, and what it is that they think about consumer AI and enterprise AI, and the difference between both.”
He found most executives were sold on the magic of generative AI and focused on the technology, rather than the potential for the business, where it could be used strategically and where the risks lay.
Kamara added that he often had to explain to business leaders that AI is not necessarily the differentiator; how it’s used and how it liberates an organisation’s people would make the difference.
John Kamara, founder and CEO, AI Centre of Excellence. (Photograph by Lesley Moyo)
It can be used to reduce the mundane part of people’s jobs, freeing them to be more creative, which would help drive the organisations, he said. “Combine their human intelligence with the artificial intelligence and they can explode. That means they become more relevant to your organisation. That also means you compete more because every enterprise will automate.
“So, where is your defining factor? Where’s your differentiator? It’s going to be the people and it’s going to be you investing in those people to understand the power of what they can do in each one of their domains.”
He also cautioned that the threat of AI for African jobs and employment opportunities was worrying, if not addressed sufficiently. “There’s a generation of young people who need jobs, who need hope.”
Part of the solution, he said, is around leveraging AI to help improve education and digital literacy of the population, and also for corporates to help support the local AI ecosystem.
Kamara said there’s a need for finding the right people to lead the local AI ecosystem. “Where are our engineers, our scientists? Why are they not leading some of these conversations? Why are they not leading when we talk about innovation? Where are the young kids who are the people driving AI innovation in a lot of these European countries, or it’s the millennials, GenZs, not the guy in the suit.”
Kamara said there also needs to be a mindset shift for enterprises, instead of following the international models for AI ecosystems. One sample sector he noted where local players are missing opportunities is telecoms. He believes telecoms operators should rethink their positions rather than simply partnering with international hyperscalers.
“They [telcos] have a lot of power if they just spend a little bit more time thinking about their role in this entire network and not just taking little steps.”
“[As a telco] I can reach the farmer in the village, I can reach the informal sector plumber, but I also know well what these people need. If you go to Azure, you still need internet connection, even if you need to use their cloud services. You have to build models. Where is the African model platform that a lot of African young developers can build into and support?”
