Co-Founder and CEO of Zeepay, Andrew Takyi-Appiah is urging Africa countries to begin adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) from the consumer standpoint to ensure the technology is safe for Africans.
Africa has always lagged several years behind the rest of the world in the adoption of modern technologies due to uncertainties around the safety of technology and its widespread adoption.
The continent was late in adopting the internet, and it is now warming up to blockchain. Now AI is also here and regulators are scratching their heads to grasp its full implications, particularly with regards to safety.
Speaking at the Mobile Technology for Development (MT4D) session at the just-ended 3i Africa Summit, Andrew Takyi-Appiah noted that Africa regulators must not put the cat before the horse by seeking to draft AI policies and regulations ahead of widespread adoption, because that will potentially stifle the full benefits of the technology on the continent.
He admitted that “AI is a necessary evil – it is a very powerful thing – we need it but it can also destroy us. We can literally go to war from an AI.”
Andrew Takyi-Appiah however argued that the way to ensure the safe adoption of AI is to begin from the consumer standpoint to ensure that the consumer behaviour is the leveraging point.
He said, instead of regulations and policy frameworks, African countries need to design protocols around just consumer behaviour in a manner that ensures that consumer interactions from an AI perspective is safe and sound.
“If we did that as a test to get into market and understand AI more, we can then scale on the back of realistic policy frameworks and regulations developed from real-life learnings,” he said.
The Zeepay boss noted that there are living examples of how AI can be used to scale SMEs, saying that hitherto, industry players were forced to use enterprise service bus (ESB), which costs up to a million dollars to deploy and get all the analytics of consumer behaviour. But with AI, it will cost just about $10 to get the same value.
He however noted that there is also need for care to be taken in the deployment of AI tools for consumer behaviour analytics, because that also exposes consumers, and that is where the protocols can help to manage the level of exposure to ensure the safety of consumers.
Andrew Takyi-Appiah insisted that going from the consumer perspective on the back of appropriate protocols rather than regulations is the way to ensure effective use of AI to develop the digitalization ecosystem across subsectors – finance, health, education, etc.
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Touching on how regulation can work effectively to drive the development of the digital finance ecosystem across the continent, the Zeepay CEO urged regulators to allow fintech innovators to lead the digitalization agenda, saying that regulation from the onset has the potential of stifling innovation.
Indeed, fintech firms and players in the fulfilment sector who leverage fintech have developed rails which can be leveraged to drive the African digital payments agenda. But Africa states are caught up in the usual talk shop around all kinds of government and continental level agreements, which have yielded very little results so far.
Andrew Takyi-Appiah explained that regulation should be at three levels – beginning with ‘conduct’, where the individual innovators and firms themselves develop products and services with integrity to ensure that customer interest is paramount.
“By integrity I mean as firms we must ensure that we have the right financial crime controls, onboarding protocols and the right money laundering programs in place,” he stated.
Then the second piece is ecosystem, where various innovators and firms come together to create common standard protocols and systems that ensure that consumer behaviour is optimal, have commons terms and agreement on how to work with each other and also do data sharing to ensure that the ecosystem is not compromised.
“If we did these things as individual firms and as an ecosystem then we will be taking regulation from the reverse then we ease the burden on the regulator and only leave the regulator with only two things to do:
- Lay out the objectives of the regulation, be it fintech or AI, and make it implementation seamless.
- Ensure oversight, which plays out in a control and non-control functions.
He said the control function requires that the regulator puts the right compliance protocols in place, noting however that there are some layers of compliance that should come directly from the regulator and others should come from industry players.
“Regulators should also concern themselves with risk controls and spell out what is a no-no and what is allowed in terms of risk management.”
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