By Dr. Emmanuel Okeleji, Chief Executive Officer, Seamless Technologies

Nigeria’s emergence as Africa’s leading country on responsible artificial intelligence governance is an important development, but it should not be mistaken for the end of the conversation. The Global Center on AI Governance recently ranked Nigeria 38th out of 135 countries on its Responsible AI Index, placing the country first in Africa and ahead of 72 percent of the countries assessed. At a time when governments across the world are still trying to determine how best to govern a technology evolving faster than most regulatory systems can respond, Nigeria’s position is a meaningful signal of progress.

But it also raises a more difficult question: what exactly are we governing if businesses are still struggling to deploy AI widely?

That question does not diminish the importance of responsible AI governance. Regulation matters. Questions around safety, accountability, transparency, data protection and the appropriate use of AI will become increasingly important as the technology becomes more capable and more deeply embedded in everyday life. Nigeria is right to be thinking about these issues early. However, responsible regulation should ultimately serve a broader economic purpose: creating the conditions in which AI can be developed and adopted responsibly, rather than becoming an exercise in policy-making disconnected from how the technology is actually being used.

The reality is that no major economy has completely solved the AI governance question. The technology is evolving too quickly for any government to have a final answer. Policymakers in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are still grappling with the appropriate balance between innovation, safety, accountability and competitiveness. Nigeria therefore does not need to pretend that it has solved a problem the rest of the world is still defining. What it needs is a regulatory environment that is clear enough to encourage adoption while remaining flexible enough to evolve with the technology.

More importantly, Nigeria needs to ensure that regulation does not become a substitute for adoption.

The bigger opportunity is economic. AI could become one of the most significant productivity technologies in modern history, and that matters enormously for Africa. The continent already faces a structural productivity challenge. If African economies are to create sufficient economic value for their rapidly growing populations, they will need to find ways to enable individuals and organisations to accomplish significantly more with the resources available to them.

It is useful to think about the coming AI transformation in the context of electricity. Electricity did not merely create a new industry; it fundamentally changed the productive capacity of almost every existing industry. It transformed manufacturing, transportation, communications and commerce, eventually becoming so embedded in modern life that it became difficult to imagine economic activity without it. AI has the potential to follow a similar trajectory.

For Africa, this creates an opportunity we should approach with urgency. Rather than viewing AI primarily through the lens of the jobs it may displace, we should also consider the scale of human productivity it could unlock.

That does not mean job displacement is not a legitimate concern. Some roles will disappear, just as some roles disappeared during previous technological transformations. Others will change substantially. But technological progress has historically been about more than replacing individual tasks. The larger economic effect comes from increasing what people are capable of producing.

Agentic AI makes this particularly relevant. An AI system that simply answers questions is useful, but an AI agent that can execute tasks, make decisions within defined parameters and work alongside people represents a much more significant shift. Humans are agents in the traditional sense: organisations employ people to perform specific functions and achieve particular outcomes. Artificial agents can increasingly perform parts of those functions, allowing human workers to supervise, collaborate with and direct a much larger amount of activity.

The opportunity is not simply to replace human workers with machines. It is to create organisations in which human capability is amplified by artificial intelligence.

This matters because Nigeria cannot afford to wait until every infrastructure challenge has been solved before participating meaningfully in the AI economy.

There is no question that infrastructure remains one of our biggest constraints. AI requires significant computing capacity, and computing ultimately requires reliable electricity. Nigeria is still dealing with fundamental infrastructure challenges, particularly around power, and these cannot be ignored. Building the infrastructure necessary to compete at every level of the AI ecosystem will require substantial capital and long-term planning.

But Nigeria does not necessarily have to build every layer of the AI infrastructure itself before it can create value from the technology. We have done this before with the internet. We did not need to build every piece of global telecommunications infrastructure before Nigerians could access the internet and build businesses on top of it. We connected to infrastructure created elsewhere and focused our energy on developing applications and services that solved local problems.

The same opportunity exists with AI.

There will be enormous competition at the infrastructure layer, where countries and companies invest in data centres, computing capacity and foundational models. Nigeria should participate where it makes economic sense. But we should also recognise where our comparative advantages lie.

Nigeria has a large and sophisticated market, a strong technology ecosystem and a history of building solutions for complex operating environments. Our opportunity is to build applications and AI-enabled workflows that address the realities of African businesses and consumers.

At Seamless Technologies, we see this transition through the organisations already using our technology across Africa. Nearly 2,000 companies use Seamless Technologies to manage their human workforce, including some of the largest organisations and institutions on the continent. The next evolution is not simply about digitising the management of human agents. It is about enabling organisations to deploy artificial agents alongside their human workforce, creating new ways for people and AI systems to work together.

This requires businesses to think beyond simply purchasing AI tools. The more important question is how AI changes the structure of work itself. If a process currently requires ten people to complete manually, the opportunity may not simply be to give each of those ten people an AI assistant. It may be to redesign the process so that humans focus on judgement, relationships and decisions while AI agents handle the repetitive execution around them.

That requires a different mindset, as well as investment in people, infrastructure and governance.

It also requires policymakers to recognise that adoption will not happen simply because a regulatory framework exists. Businesses need access to infrastructure, capital, skills and practical incentives that make experimentation and deployment possible.

Nigeria’s AI agenda therefore needs to become broader. We need regulation, but we also need infrastructure. We need investment in computing capacity, but we also need reliable electricity. We need data governance, but we also need organisations capable of using data effectively. We need AI skills, but we also need businesses prepared to rethink how they operate around those skills.

Most importantly, we need to measure progress by outcomes.

Nigeria should rightly celebrate being ranked first in Africa for responsible AI governance. But the more consequential question over the next few years will be whether Nigerian businesses become significantly more productive because of AI. How many companies are using AI in meaningful workflows? How much time is being saved? How much more can an employee accomplish? How many new products and businesses can be created? How much economic value can AI generate?

Those are the metrics that will ultimately determine whether Nigeria has truly positioned itself for the AI economy.

Africa has spent decades attempting to close technological gaps with the rest of the world. AI presents a rare opportunity to approach technological development differently. We do not have to reproduce every stage of industrial and digital development that other economies went through before us. Where infrastructure limitations make it difficult to compete at one layer of the technology ecosystem, we can look for opportunities to compete at another. Where traditional approaches have constrained productivity, we can use AI to rethink how work gets done.

But leapfrogging is not automatic. Technology does not transform an economy simply because it exists. Transformation happens when businesses adopt it, when workers learn to work with it, when capital flows towards it and when governments create an environment in which innovation can happen responsibly.

Nigeria has made an encouraging start on governance. The next challenge is considerably harder: turning responsible AI governance into widespread adoption and measurable productivity gains.

If we get that right, AI will not simply become another technology that Nigeria consumes. It can become a technology that Nigerian businesses use to compete, Nigerian workers use to multiply their capabilities, and the wider African economy uses to close one of its most persistent structural gaps.

The real test of Nigeria’s AI readiness will therefore not be how well we regulate the technology in isolation. It will be whether we can create the conditions for Nigerians to use it responsibly, widely and effectively to create more value than they could before.

Regulation can create the guardrails. Adoption will determine how far we go.