AI can do a lot more for West African businesses than help with marketing

By Oluwafiropo Tobi Ogundare, Regional Sales Lead for West Africa & Mauritius at Red Hat

When it comes to businesses in West Africa showing interest in AI/ML technologies, much of this interest revolves around how these technologies can be used to enhance an organisation’s marketing operations or extract value from accumulated customer data. It makes sense, as these are the functions that, over the last five years, have benefitted the most from AI-enabled applications and services. Generative AI (GenAI) has revolutionised consumer marketing by offering hyper-personalisation at scale and process automation to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

However, businesses cannot afford to stop there. Implemented successfully, AI/ML can extend beyond an organisation’s marketing department and enhance internal operations, especially in industries where IT estates touch every corner, and AI emerges as an important tool. The ingredients for a successful implementation are infrastructure consistency and interoperability, which businesses can achieve with the help of enterprise-grade platforms that serve as the foundation for modernisation and innovation.

It’s not just for appearance’s sake
Broadly speaking, AI is a powerful tool for organisations to streamline operations, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. Studies have shown that business executives worldwide are generally positive about the impact of AI, with many believing that the technology will augment and enhance human capabilities, letting employees focus on higher-value tasks that require strategic thinking and creativity.

For many businesses, the question surrounding AI is how it benefits operational efficiency – how it enables them to do things better, faster, and cheaper – as well as how it assists in the adoption and maintenance of other, new technologies. The key to this is artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps), where enterprise IT teams integrate IT operations tools by way of a centralised platform, enabling them to better manage their expanding technology ecosystem.

IT operations management is becoming increasingly critical for West African businesses as they digitally transform. With the help of an AIOps strategy, businesses can consider AI/ML implementations across their organisations while increasing their observability, lowering their operational costs, and proactively responding to any anomalies, incidents, or outages.

Driving innovation in critical industries
Leveraging data to deliver business insights, automate tasks, and enhance IT system capabilities, AI/ML technologies transform all aspects of a business, enabling them to achieve outcomes specific to their industry.

Arguably, the industry that has benefitted and fully embraced AI is financial services, where fintech has driven the transformation of traditional banking systems in countries like Nigeria at an impressive pace. AI, particularly GenAI, offers a lot of potential as either standard or self-developed software, regardless of whether it’s for manual work or automated solutions. GenAI applications can help with code writing and process automation, measuring providers’ sustainability impacts, trends and sentiment analysis, and in-store service augmentation.

Meanwhile, in telecommunications, service providers are unlocking significant benefits with AI particularly when it comes to an increasing region-wide demand for network and connectivity solutions. Telcos use AI to optimise their networks by monitoring data volumes in real time. AI-enabled applications can detect and prevent fraud by identifying patterns and, when integrated with 5G and IoT, expand product and service offerings, accelerate rollout, enhance security, and support them through predictive maintenance. As more and more businesses digitalise, telcos serve as enablers and assist enterprises in their own AI/ML implementations.

Of course, all these industries use cases and others are subject to the same inherent challenges. Businesses need to be able to manage their initial technology investments. They need to know what AI models and programmes are the best fit for their organisation, and whether they are compatible with older, legacy systems.

Implementing across the organisation
If businesses in West Africa are to adopt AI into their organisations, the adoption process has to be as simple as possible and deliver the consistency needed for any kind of project. At the same time, the growth of cloud computing means development platforms need to be agnostic, meaning they let teams build, train, and deploy AI/ML workloads in any environment.

Instead of relying on models and suites offered by individual cloud and software vendors, enterprise open-source platforms like Red Hat OpenShift AI enable businesses to build their own models and focus on application development without having to wait to provision the necessary infrastructure. It also enables teams of data scientists, engineers, and app developers to collaborate and, in doing so, reinforce consistency and security across all environments.

West African businesses should not limit their scope when it comes to what AI/ML can do for their organisation. Successful implementations are measured by impact on an organisational scale. With the help of enterprise-grade platforms that facilitate application development, transform traditional processes, and enable businesses to leverage data-driven insights, businesses can extract as much value from AI as possible.