By Zainab Afuape
Across Africa’s AI ecosystem, something has become predictable. A new model is launched. A chatbot goes live. A startup announces an “AI-powered” product. A demo circulates. There is excitement, sometimes even funding. And then, quietly, the system begins to degrade.
Not because the idea was wrong. Not because the model was incapable. But because what was built was never a system in the first place.
The continent does not have a model problem. It has an execution problem.
For too long, progress in AI has been measured by the wrong unit. The assumption has been that building intelligence is the hard part. Once a model works, everything else will follow. But in production environments, that assumption breaks almost immediately.
