AI's next frontier isn't where you might expect | Hardy Pemhiwa

I've been meeting a lot of people of late who ask me this question: “When will Africa catch up to the AI revolution?” And I look at them with a lot of humility, and I say to them, "You're asking the wrong question." And of course, a lot of them look at me with surprise. I say, here is the right question: “When will the world catch up to what Africa is doing with AI?” But before I dive into AI, you've heard a lot about AI, let me take you on a geography lesson. (Laughter) Africa is big. Just breathe in. Take it in. Find your country inside Africa. It's 54 countries, 1.6 billion people, 3,000 languages, not counting dialects. And Africa is young. I'm one of the older ones. And I consider myself young. (Laughter) Sixty percent of the world's youth is going to be African by the year 2050. These are digital natives, incredible digital skills. But it wasn't always like this. Thirty years ago, 75 percent of Africans had never had a phone ring. There were five million telephone lines in Africa. There were more telephone lines in New York City than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. But that was 30 years ago. In 30 years, here's what has happened. We now have a billion mobile phone connections. We now have 1.1 billion mobile money accounts. That's up from only 300 million 10 years ago. It's driving financial inclusion at an unprecedented scale. Today, if I needed to pay my barber, the food vendor on the side of the road, my utility bill, my mechanic, it's easy, it's accessible, it's convenient, and it's cheap. I use my mobile money account, whether it's EcoCash or M-Pesa, it's one of those two. But Africa's demographic dividend is also one of its biggest challenges. I know, a lot of people think of Africa and they think of poverty and disease and wars, but this is not our biggest problem. Our biggest challenge is youth unemployment. And I think it's one challenge that AI is uniquely placed to solve. And Africa has been able to embrace technology at an unprecedented scale. So now that we've been through geography, let me take you into the future. Please meet Yemurai. Yemurai is 24. She’s a high school graduate. Born in Zimbabwe and raised in Zimbabwe, like me. Like millions of her peers, she's tech savvy. She can type faster than any of you. She knows all the shortcuts on WhatsApp. But up until now, her future would have been bleak. She would have been as unemployed as any of her peers but for the fact that she has just graduated from one of the AI academies that we have on the continent. And this is where we find her. Early morning, Yemurai is teaching math, using AI to over 200 students across five schools. These schools have got free internet. By midday, Yemurai has joined the local nurse at a health clinic that is not too far away from where she lives. Helping with diagnosis, malaria, TB, bilharzia -- that’s a disease, by the way. And by the evening, some of her neighbors are coming to see Yemurai with soil samples and with diseased plants that she takes photos of, and she's able to tell them what fertilizer, what seeds, what's happening to their maize crop. Yields are now up 40 percent where she lives. But Yemurai is not a teacher. She's not a nurse. She's not an agronomist. What is she? She's what we call an AI-amplified community entrepreneur. She's paid for each of these services that I described through her mobile money accounts, and she's earning three times more than the peers in her local area, and even those that are in the urban areas. She's solving the problem of the shortage of teachers that is so pervasive across most of Africa. This is how we're going to solve the problem of a shortage of doctors that is so pervasive across most of Africa. And in many of the rural areas of Africa, where there's so much arable land, there is such a shortage of agronomists. And now Yemurai, powered with a smartphone and an AI assistant, is able to solve these problems. Now I'm looking at you and you're asking yourselves, how is this even possible? I'm glad you asked. My name is Hardy Pemhiwa, I am the CEO of Cassava Technologies. We are the company that has literally connected Africa. The map that you see on the screen is not a plan. It's a map that shows 110,000 kilometers of fiber that we have built across the African continent, literally from Cape Town to Cairo, from Mombasa on the east coast to Moanda on the west coast. We are connecting more than 300 towns and cities across Africa with fiber broadband, bringing internet to more than 500 million people across the continent. And we have now added a platform of interconnected data centers that are AI-ready. And this is where AI meets the infrastructure that Cassava has been building. Our plan now is to build Africa's first AI factory using local data, algorithms, local compute capacity to produce local intelligence. We're building an AI ecosystem for those that were previously excluded, because we understand that without AI infrastructure, Africa is going to fall further behind. Our AI factory is about bringing breakthroughs. It's about bringing job creation. It's about powering Yemurai's dream of being a doctor, an agronomist and a teacher. Powered with mobile broadband, mobile money, fiber broadband and now GPUs that we've been able to get from Nvidia, we are bringing to life AI infrastructure for Africa to compete with everybody else in this AI age. This is Africa's AI revolution. It's not about substitution, it's about multiplication. We want to amplify human capacity, and we want to eliminate impossibility by bringing AI to those that the world had previously excluded. So what is our AI factory going to do? Already, we're powering more than 12,000 AI developers, more than 1,100 startups, across Southern Africa, East Africa West Africa and North Africa. 285 universities are going to be using our AI factory. And because we've already been working with enterprises for the past 30 years, 67,000 of Africa's largest enterprises, from banks to telcos to state-owned enterprises, are all embracing this vision of an AI-powered future for the continent. On a continent where the median age is only 19, this is not just an improvement of digital infrastructure. This is a revolution that we are bringing to Africa. Because the next one billion users of AI are not going to use AI the same way that the first one billion have been using it. They are coming from places where a single AI-amplified human must do the work of 10. They are building AI to not only diagnose diseases that some of us have never heard of, but to teach math and physics and chemistry in Swahili, in Ndebele, in Zulu, in Shona, you name it. They are building AI in order to detect counterfeit medicines. Africa has a big problem with counterfeit medicines. They are building AI to diagnose crops. They're building AI to amplify human possibility. Because in Africa, constraints have always driven innovation. That's why pay-as-you-go came from Africa. That's why mobile money came from Africa. Because we didn't have bank accounts to protect. And that's why AI models that are trained on African realities are more robust, more efficient, and more inclusive. So I'm going to go back to my initial question that I've been asked by so many, including some that I've met during this conference. “When will Africa catch up to the AI revolution?” I'm sure you agree with me that whilst we sit here in this conference, talking about AI ethics, in Africa, we are deploying AI to serve the many and not the few. We are optimizing AI for impact and not for social media clicks. (Applause) Thirty years ago, the "experts on Africa" said it would take 50 years for Africa to have the kind of mobile telephony that we have. And they estimated that it would require 50 billion dollars to do it. Well, I have news for you: 70 percent of the mobile money transactions that are going to happen in the world today are going to happen on African soil. And guess what? Africa is ready to do it again. We want to make AI inclusive, accessible, relevant and affordable. Because the future of AI is not just going to be written in Silicon Valley. The future of AI is going to be to be written in the Silicon Savanna in Kenya. It's going to be written on the streets of Lagos. It's going to be written in thousands of villages that some of us have never heard of. There are millions of Yemurais out there that are writing the future of AI, solving problems that we didn't even know existed, building a future where AI amplifies human potential instead of replacing it. In London, they are worrying about whether teachers are going to lose their jobs because of AI. In Africa, we're embracing AI to solve the shortage of teachers. In New York, they're building AI algorithms in order to trade stocks faster. For us, it's about AI that can increase crop yields and reduce mortality amongst five-year-olds. That's the future of AI. So this is not just Africa's AI moment. This is AI's Africa moment. Are you coming? (Applause)