ATF 2023: Accenture's Nitesh Singh on harnessing AI for African business

Nitesh Singh, MD for communications, media and technology at Accenture Africa, joined Connecting Africa Editor Paula Gilbert at Africa Tech Festival 2023 in Cape Town, South Africa, for a video interview to talk about artificial intelligence (AI) and how African businesses can embrace the good of AI and avoid the bad.

He said African businesses need to educate themselves about AI and generative AI and skill up in this space in order to figure out the value it can bring to their particular business.

"Doing AI for the sake of AI is not something I would recommend. It's about trying to get the value story right [to see] how it's going to impact the business at a fundamental level," he said.

He spoke about how AI has become more accessible for small businesses to use and how the growing trend of generative AI is impacting African enterprises of all sizes.

Singh shared that African mobile operators are already embracing AI on their networks.

"If you look at predictive analytics and AI on the network, the network is constantly learning. If you think about it practically, if you are having outages etc., artificial intelligence on the network is going to mean a self-healing network," he said.

Singh also spoke about AI governance challenges surrounding data privacy for consumers, enterprises and public institutions, and how the ethical use of AI can make a positive impact on the world.

— Paula Gilbert, Editor, Connecting Africa