Kudzanai Sharara in Cape Town, South Africa
Samuelle Dimairho, Group CEO of Aura Group, has urged African businesses to stop being passive consumers of artificial intelligence and instead develop localised solutions using their own data, hosted within their own countries.
Speaking on a panel titled “AI, Fintech, and Productivity: Transforming African Economies” at the CEO Africa Annual Roundtable in Cape Town, Mr Dimairho said the continent was “not thinking about it often enough” and was “consumers of AI, not doers of it”.
He said there were many open-source elements available, but businesses were failing to use them to develop AI solutions customised for their own operations. He suggested that companies could call on models such as Claude and ChatGPT to refine and localise their solutions, noting that connecting through an API is often considerably cheaper than paying for a subscription.
“If you are connected to ChatGPT and use the API, it’s a lot cheaper than the subscription that we pay for, because now you’re just pulling it when you need it, and you’re using what you’re paying for,” he said. He likened traditional subscriptions to a “copy-and-fix” arrangement in which “in many cases you don’t use it”.
Mr Dimairho called on every business leader in the room to build their own AI capability using open-source tools, with company data hosted locally. “Create your element with your own company data hosted within your country,” he said.
He also called for greater investment in domestic data centres and for policies that stimulate demand for cloud infrastructure. “We need to push for us to have data centres. We need to have our localised data centres where our data is stored,” he said. “And we need policies that stimulate the demand for cloud infrastructure,” he added, saying this would allow businesses to run their operations securely and independently.
Mr Dimairho appeared alongside Leleti Gachago, Strategic Business Development Officer at Future Trends Group, and Tonderai Kachecha, Founder and Director of Northlea Consulting Limited.
The panel formed part of the CEO Africa Annual Roundtable, which runs from 6 to 10 October under the theme “The Future of Africa: Innovate, Trade and Grow”
