Today I want to talk about AI.

Because lately, everyone’s talking about it, and I’m troubled. Not by the tech itself, but by how we’re talking about it.

Experts, tech influencers, and business leaders are hyped up. They frame AI as a powerful tool for creating businesses, growing wealth, and speeding up processes. Especially with all this new talk about Artificial General Intelligence and AI agents. The language is all about potential; supply, scale, speed.

But almost none of it is about people.

A global tech, a lopsided conversation

I’m watching this from the so-called Global North, but my story began in the Global South, where I first saw what innovation looks like from the ground up. So, when I hear the AI conversation today, I can’t help but feel how deeply one-sided it is.

Take Africa, for instance. There’s a narrative circulating: Africa is behind in AI. They lack funding. They lack experts.

False.

There are plenty of African experts (apparently in the Global North) already contributing to AI. Particularly in training large language models. The problem isn’t brains. It’s data. Africa doesn’t have enough training data that reflects its own cultures, languages, and contexts.

So, when AI goes to Africa, into African hospitals, farms, schools, it sends with it models trained elsewhere (even though by Africans, partly). But still on data that doesn’t recognize the local realities in Africa. And suddenly, “innovation” starts to look a lot like misalignment.

Whose jobs are being “streamlined”?

Now let’s talk jobs. I recently saw a post celebrating how AI helped a company lay off a thousand people. Just like that, “efficiency.”

But here’s the obvious question: if you let go of a thousand workers, who will afford the products you’re now selling “more efficiently”? Who will remain as your customer when the very people who once bought from you no longer have income?

It’s a dangerous kind of logic, where we celebrate business savings but ignore the social costs. Especially in African economies where the so-called “repetitive tasks” that AI is replacing are often people’s livelihoods. Manual labor in agriculture, small clerical jobs, local services (yes, AI is nowhere near here, but certainly, it’s hyped to be there). These repetitive tasks aren’t “inefficiencies,” they’re survival.

Technology isn’t saving us money. It’s costing us people.

The billion-dollar illusion

Another LinkedIn gem I saw: Africa has far fewer billion-dollar companies compared to the U.S. or Europe. So, the argument goes, Africa needs to “catch up,” and AI will help Africa catch up!

Wait, what? Catch up? Catch up to what, exactly?

Do Africans need billion-dollar companies? Or do Africa need resilient systems that work for the everyday African? Why compare valuations in Nigerian Naira, Ghana Cedis, Kenyan Shillings or South African Rands to U.S. dollars or Euros, as if that’s a meaningful metric?

These comparisons flatten reality. They strip away context. And worst of all, they sell the idea that success looks the same everywhere.

Spoiler: It doesn’t.

Where are the systems thinkers?

The hyped AI conversation is dominated by engineers, venture capitalists, and futurists. Algorithm seems to favour this lot, a lot. It begs the buts. Yes, but where are the systems thinkers? The biologists? The sociologists? The people who understand adaptive complexity?

We’re feeding large language models oceans of data, but what do we really know about how these systems learn, hallucinate, or break? The biologists will ask these questions. Systems thinkers’ sociologists will ask these questions. They might be asking, but AI itself might be strangling them. In that algorithms might be un-levelling the playing field. But for what gain? Isn’t it getting to a point where there’s a bubble that will eventually burst on its own? Because if an AI agent starts making decisions, how will we know it understands its task? Will it ever “understand” the way we do? We who? See, humans? Yes, I play a little, because AI might have written this critique!!! Joke on us all, it is this complicated, for real!

Any who, there’s something dangerous about pretending the tech is more capable than it is, and ignoring the very real ways it’s already disrupting lives.

Africa’s place in the hype machine

Let’s circle back to Africa. Even if AI tools become available on the continent, who will be able to use them? Who will afford them? Who will they actually help?

That’s the demand-side question nobody wants to answer. Or maybe it’s the question the algorithm doesn’t want to show me, and you.

Either way, it’s missing. And so is common sense.

We’ve spent the past decade watching big promises from Silicon Valley fall flat. “By 2029, AI will do everything from A to Z better than humans.” Sure. We’ve heard it before. Still waiting.

Meanwhile, in places like Africa, specifically Kenya for example, even their “fintech revolution” has made it harder for ordinary people to save, borrow, or transact affordably. The more sophisticated the technology gets, the more expensive life becomes. Why? Because the people designing these systems aren’t thinking about us, the people, not only Africans, or Kenyans, but the world over. They’re thinking about profit margins.

The bottom line is that

This conversation isn’t about whether AI is “good” or “bad.” It’s about perspective. Right now, most of what’s being said about AI is written for investors, entrepreneurs, and tech bros. Not for the people most affected by its roll-out.

If we don’t start asking harder questions. Questions about demand, access, ethics, and equity, we’re not just risking job losses. We’re risking entire communities being left behind.

So, here’s my question:
If AI takes your product, service offering to the next level, and then takes your customer’s job… who wins?

We want to hear from you.

Have you already felt the impact of AI? Seen it help, or harm, you? your community? Tell us what the hype gets wrong. At NARRIVE MEDIA, we believe the stories that matter most are often the ones we don’t hear.

📣 Share your story here https://narrive.media/media/