Tade Samson

Recently, we’ve seen a surge in AI-assisted games and applications. They look fascinating, and some have taken our excitement about what’s possible with AI to an entirely new level. That’s great. But amid all this excitement, I believe there’s a conversation we need to have. AI innovation is here, and African entrepreneurs risk repeating the same mistakes we made during the internet revolution. When the internet arrived, we eagerly jumped on the bandwagon. But in doing so, we skipped critical stages of development that would have allowed the internet to unlock the same level of productivity it unleashed across much of the world. Our road networks were nothing to write home about, yet we rushed to build e-commerce platforms. Insecurity was already alarming, yet we continued building grid infrastructure that was vulnerable to sabotage every other week. Our policies and educational infrastructure remained fragmented, yet we built countless EdTech products hoping to positively impact millions of students. The ambition was admirable. The problem was that the foundations needed to support these innovations were largely missing. It was glaringly obvious that we were never truly ready for the internet revolution. Now, we have AI. And the question remains: Are we ready for AI? My answer is yes. Unlike many previous technological revolutions, AI offers us an opportunity to overcome some of the very limitations that have held us back. It is an enabler capable of breaking through the barriers of time, distance, and resource constraints when applied to the right problems. But that brings us to an even more important question: Are African entrepreneurs solving the right problems with AI? Some of the solutions we’re seeing today would have been fascinating in the pre-AI era. But spending millions to build them now, simply because AI makes them possible, may do very little to improve productivity or create meaningful economic value. I believe we need to return to the basics and rethink the problems we choose to solve. How can we transform healthcare through agentic workflows? How can we redesign policies to make these workflows efficient while still respecting data sovereignty? How can we connect the healthcare and fitness industries to move beyond treating diseases toward preventing the conditions that lead to life-threatening illnesses? How can we build the industries we missed out on during previous technological revolutions, this time powered by spatial AI and robotics, to dramatically increase productivity and expand our capacity to produce and export raw materials at a scale we once thought impossible? These are the kinds of problems I believe deserve more of our attention, capital, and entrepreneurial energy. We should be looking much more seriously toward physical AI: bringing intelligence into the physical world to transform how we manufacture, produce, transport, deliver healthcare, and build infrastructure. That doesn’t mean abandoning the software industry we’ve already built. Quite the opposite. We should strengthen and augment it with AI. It has never been easier to start another software company. But ease of creation should not be confused with the magnitude of impact. The real transformative potential of AI, particularly for Africa, extends far beyond software. It lies in our ability to use intelligence to solve the physical, structural, and industrial challenges that have constrained our productivity for decades. We cannot afford to repeat the internet era, where we built digital solutions on top of systems that were not ready to support them. This time, we have an opportunity to do things differently.