Africa to miss out on AI revolution benefits

AFRICAN economies risk being left behind in the artificial intelligence (AI) shift that is changing the way companies do business, with the continent’s low capacity for virtual storage and increasingly outdated mobile technology a cause for concern.

Businesses that incorporate AI into their processes require high speed connectivity and sizable data storage capacity, a fact that is now pushing tech firms to invest billions of dollars in virtual data storage facilities.

In Africa, according to the African Telecommunications Union (ATU), investments are still going towards closing a connectivity gap—bringing more people into the network especially in rural areas. Although Africa has largely moved on from 2G technology, it is still seeing investment go into 3G and 4G networks, at a time when the rest of the world is leaning on 5G tech to support varied fields such as autonomous vehicle operations, urban management and content creation. ATU Secretary General John Omo, in an interview last week on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Spain, told this publication that making the leap to the AI age will require investment by governments and the private sector into cloud storage and upgrades to 5G technology.

The continent also needs public education to prepare users to utilise the emerging opportunities that will come up as a result.

“Switzerland alone has more cloud space than the entire Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s how far we have to go as a continent in terms of establishing cloud computing and one network,” said Mr Omo.

“Looking at the MWC, artificial intelligence has taken over how we’ll do business, whether in agriculture, media, ICT and others. There’s a fair amount of work to be done in this space in Africa, including in data legislation considering that AI runs mainly on data.”