African businesses are leveraging AI to overcome challenges and accelerate growth in unique ways, this DLD25 panel discussion highlights. Moderated by Franziska Reh (Uncap), the session brings together Euler Bropleh (VestedWorld), Daniel Emaasit (Logistify AI) and Yasmin Kumi (Africa Foresight Group) and reveals how AI can help address Africa’s talent mismatch while creating high-quality jobs for its rapidly growing population.
Investor Euler Bropleh emphasizes AI’s potential to help Africa leapfrog traditional development patterns, similar to how the continent bypassed landline infrastructure to adopt mobile phones.
“AI has the potential to be transformative”, he says, pointing to health care and education as examples. In both sectors, Africa has many underserved communities, “and the quality is all less than it should be”, Bropleh notes. “AI can transform that.”
His own investment portfolio includes companies like Viamo, which provides AI-powered health information via mobile phone, and Farmworks, which uses machine learning to optimize agricultural supply chains.
Daniel Emaasit shares how his company Logistify AI pivoted from traditional warehousing operations to AI automation after seeing the potential of new AI models. “We are in a different AI era where we are seeing value”, he says, “as opposed to the previous AI eras, where it was mainly experimental work.”
His company now uses AI to “automate a lot of this manual, repetitive, labor-intensive work that, honestly, nobody should be doing”, Emaasit explains. His company serves clients not only in Africa but also in the U.K. and the U.S., which represents a shift to African companies exporting AI solutions as well.
Yasmin Kumi highlights the mismatch between available skills and the demands of African businesses, which limits job creation despite the continent’s vast workforce. She sees AI as a tool to upskill employees and enable businesses to grow faster.
“We can actually create super workers in Africa that can finally catalyze the growth of African companies faster and maybe also in the world”, she says. Her company, Africa Foresight Group, is “building the largest flexible work platform on the continent for any business in Africa”, Kumi says, allowing these companies “to find top gig workers from any country on the continent.”
Watch the video for more practical applications of AI in African businesses.
