Scaling AI for the Nigerian economy

The public launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022 further accelerated Africa’s digital transformation landscape, post-COVID. The prominence of artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that has existed since the 1960s, has skyrocketed with the release of generative AI tools.

In Nigeria, AI developments did not go untold, with the Honourable Minister of Communication, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, spearheading the development of a national AI strategy. In the same vein of using AI solutions to address national development priorities, Nigeria signed an MoU with the Gates Foundation to host one of the AI Scaling Hub (AISH) locations in Africa – anchored at Lagos Business School (LBS).

AI as a productivity multiplier

In Nigeria’s business landscape, AI is viewed through the lens of individual applications such as chatbots for customer service or automated credit scoring. However, the true economic opportunity lies in scaling. For AI to move the needle on Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP), it must transition from fragmented pilot solutions to a national utility immersed across developmental sectors.

The AISH is designed to be the engine room of this transition. By leveraging LBS’s position at the intersection of academic rigour and private-sector leadership, the Hub serves as a neutral ground where supply (tech innovators), demand (industry leaders), and policy (regulators and policymakers) converge to build a coherent ecosystem.

The Lagos Business School advantage

As the host of the Nigeria AI Scaling Hub, Lagos Business School provides more than just a physical location. It provides the governance framework and ethical oversight for high-stakes AI deployment. In sectors such as healthcare and financial services, the right to play is underpinned by trust. LBS ensures that, as we scale AI, we do so with models that are transparent, auditable, and aligned with global and local governance standards.

The Hub’s mandate is intentionally targeted at sectors that define the Nigerian experience, such as agriculture, healthcare, education, and government services. For example, in agriculture, the Hub can facilitate the transition from subsistence to precision farming by providing AI-ready soil and weather data to AgTech innovators. In education, it can support teacher-facing responsibilities by automating administrative tasks, allowing educators to focus on lesson planning and mentorship. In healthcare, it can create regulatory and technical pathways for doctor- or health worker-facing diagnostic or screening tools to be validated and deployed safely.

Furthermore, under the AI Collective initiative, LBS plays a critical role in training the next generation of AI-literate leaders across the public and private sectors and in ensuring that leadership capacity exists to manage the disruptive potential of these technologies.

Addressing the infrastructure bottleneck

The most significant contribution of the AISH will be its focus not just on AI, but also on the foundational digital public infrastructure (DPI) stack alongside sectoral equivalents – pedagogical (education), clinical (healthcare), agrifood (agriculture), governance (government), and trust and inclusion (financial services). Our research indicates that the primary barrier to scaling AI in Nigeria isn’t a lack of talent, but a lack of “system-facing” rails.

Be it a national soil registry for agriculture or a federated health data exchange for healthcare, these infrastructure layers are the “digital roads” upon which AI agents travel. The AISH is committed to building these rails alongside AI solutions (AI + DPI), ensuring that local innovators can plug into verified national data streams, reducing innovation costs and accelerating time-to-market for AgTech, EdTech, and HealthTech startups. Working with partners such as Data Science Nigeria, the AISH will have access to voice and language (African Voices) datasets relevant to Nigerian contexts.

A call to strategic action

In global climes where computing power and data are becoming the new “oil”, Nigeria cannot afford to be a passive consumer. The Nigeria AI Scaling Hub is our strategic response to the global AI divide. By hosting local compute clusters and curating indigenous datasets, the AISH ensures that our AI models speak our languages, understand our nuances, and serve our unique developmental goals. We are securing our technological sovereignty.

The Nigeria AI Scaling Hub is more than just a research centre; it is a commitment to a future where technology is not a luxury but a utility for shared prosperity. By aligning the interests of government, academia (led by institutions like Lagos Business School), and the private sector, we are not just preparing for an AI-driven world – we are building it, and they will come.

 

Prof Olayinka David-West