In 1907, U.S. Steel sat on the mountaintop as America’s most capitalized company. Fifty years later, IBM took the crown, when its mainframe computers defined an age where bits began to rival bricks. In the 1980s, Jack Welch’s General Electric ruled, turning conglomerate efficiency into an art form. And today, the race of titans continues with Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia exchanging relay batons in the global market. Yet, one lesson remains timeless: moments come, and moments go.
Steel built bridges and railways, and those who forged it ruled. Then transistors came from Bell Labs as Shockley’s genius heralded the dawn of automation. When Bill Gates and his Microsoft team democratized computing, they didn’t merely create products; they redefined how business operates. Windows was not just software; it was a gateway to a new business model. And that has always been the difference between a product and a revolution: a product sells; a model transforms.
Jack Welch perfected the conglomerate as a performance machine, optimizing for efficiency, process, and scale. But we have moved into a different era, what I have called the Accelerated Society, an age when computational systems compound value and intelligence faster than human planning cycles. Artificial Intelligence sits at the center of this transformation. Yet, as I have often written, no one eats AI. The value is not in AI itself, but in what AI enables you to do, just as transistors birthed the electronics age and microprocessors powered the digital economy.
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Africa’s opportunity is not in chasing the next chatbot or AI language model. It is in rethinking business models using AI as leverage. In the 1990s, Nigeria’s new generation banks did not merely install computers; they rewired the banking model. The Integrated Banking System they deployed made geography irrelevant; you could open an account in Lagos and withdraw in Kano. That was not technology; that was a new model of value creation. Our boss and Nigeria’s finest banking innovator, Chairman Paschal Dozie (RIP) of Diamond Bank, transformed a nation with DIBS (diamond integrated banking system) as others copied!
Good People, as AI arrives and scales, the call is the same: do not just deploy technology, TRANSFORM with it. Let AI become the transistor of your enterprise, not the toy on your dashboard. Business models, not machines, will define Africa’s next wealth creation frontier. And those business models are Africa’s Greatest AI Opportunity!
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