Africa’s AI moment: They say data is the new gold. But who is drilling it?

There is a graph I recently came across that I have not been able to stop thinking about. It compared the adoption curves of some of the most consequential technologies in modern history; the railway, electricity, the internet and now artificial intelligence. What stood out was not simply that AI is being adopted quickly.

It was the speed at which adoption is happening alongside an enormous concentration of capital, talent and investment. That should make Africa pay attention. Because every major technological transition creates more than new products.

It creates new industries, new infrastructure, new companies and, ultimately, new centres of economic power. The railway did not simply change transportation. It reorganised economies around new infrastructure.

The internet did not simply change communication. It created entirely new industries. AI is now beginning to change something even more fundamental: the economics of intelligence.

And that raises a question Africa cannot afford to answer too late: What position do we intend to occupy in the emerging AI economy? From users to builders Africa has already demonstrated that it can take technologies developed elsewhere and apply them in extraordinary ways. Mobile money is perhaps one of the clearest examples.

Kenya did not invent the mobile phone. But it combined existing technologies around a distinctly African problem and created M-PESA, a system that became globally influential. Innovation does not always mean inventing every underlying component from scratch.