AI in African businesses: where to start?

Since 2023, artificial intelligence has been on everyone's lips. In African businesses too. But between the pressure from executives who want to "integrate AI" and the teams who don't concretely know what to do, there is a gulf that we observe every day on the ground in Benin, Togo and Côte d'Ivoire.

1. Start by identifying your repetitive tasks

AI is not a magic wand. It excels at one very specific kind of work: repetitive, structured and predictable tasks. Before any training, we advise our clients to list the activities their teams perform more than three times a week in the same way. Email classification, report generation, meeting summaries: these are your first testing grounds.

2. Train the decision-makers first

A classic mistake: training only front-line staff without managers understanding what AI can · and cannot · do. The result: teams use the tools for two weeks and then give up for lack of support from above. At Urban Academy, our training always begins with a workshop aimed at executives and senior managers.

3. Measure before you deploy

How do you know whether AI has really helped? By defining a baseline before deployment. How much time does your team currently spend writing up your meeting minutes? What is the error rate in your manual data entry? These figures are your benchmarks. They will turn your AI ROI from a hunch into a conviction grounded in data.

4. Post-training support is non-negotiable

A one-day training course does not change fifteen years of habits. That is why every Urban Academy programme includes 4 to 8 weeks of follow-up: Q&A sessions, correction of usage mistakes, adaptation to the specific challenges of each role. It is this support that turns an investment in training into lasting change.