Africa is having its AI moment. From Nairobi to Lagos, Kigali to Cape Town AI is everywhere. Governments are hosting AI summits. Donors are sponsoring hackathons. Big tech players are promising to unlock billions in value across sectors like agriculture, healthcare, education, and finance.
McKinsey projects AI could add $1.3 trillion to Africa’s economy by 2030. GSMA highlights Africa as the fastest-growing mobile and AI market. The African Union has even published an AI strategy calling for "homegrown AI solutions".
It sounds promising on the surface. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find something troubling.
The Endless Loop of Demos
If you’ve spent any time in Africa’s tech ecosystem, this pattern will sound familiar:
- A shiny AI challenge or pitch competition is announced.
- Dozens of teams compete, building demos with synthetic data and perfect conditions.
- Judges clap. Winners are crowned. The media picks it up.
And then? Nothing.
Those "world-changing" solutions quietly disappear before they ever see a real user. The teams move on to the next prize. The cycle repeats.
We’ve built a culture that celebrates concepts, not commitments. We reward pitch decks, not production deployments.
Why Demos Are Cheap, but Deployments Are Hard
The truth is: Building a demo is easy. Deploying AI in production is hard.
A demo doesn’t have to deal with:
- Messy, multilingual African data.
- Slow or unstable internet.
- Regulatory roadblocks.
- End-user trust and adoption.
- Integration with legacy systems like telcos, banks, or government platforms.
A production deployment, on the other hand, requires all of that — and more.
Take Swahili conversational AI as an example. It’s one thing to build a prototype that understands “Habari”. It’s another thing to:
- Serve real customers 24/7 on WhatsApp.
- Integrate with payment providers like Selcom.
- Handle live order management and fulfillment.
- Support multiple dialects, user accents, and poor network conditions.
This is the work that rarely gets funded, barely gets celebrated, and yet makes all the difference.
The High Cost of Africa’s “Demo Culture”
By focusing on demos over deployments, we:
- Create hype with no lasting value.
- Waste funding on short-lived projects.
- Saturate the market with prototypes that never scale.
- Erode trust among businesses, governments, and investors.
Over time, this kills confidence in Africa’s ability to build world-class AI. It signals that we are a continent of pitchers, not producers.
What Africa Needs Next
If Africa is serious about AI, we must shift focus from winning the stage to winning the market.
- Stop over-celebrating prototypes.
- Fund teams committed to shipping production-ready AI.
- Support long-term product development, not just hackathons.
- Invest in data infrastructure, local talent, and compute capacity.
- Hold builders accountable to real-world impact, not media hype.
A Call to the Builders, Funders, and Policymakers
Africa’s future won’t be shaped by who pitched best It will be shaped by who built best.
Let’s move beyond the endless loop of demos. Let’s get serious about deploying AI that works in production, for real customers, solving real problems.
Because in the end, Africa doesn’t need more AI dreamers. Africa needs AI doers.