I've been meeting a lot of people of late who ask me this question: “When will Africa catch up to the AI revolution?” And I look at them with a lot of humility, and I say to them, "You're asking the wrong question." And of course, a lot of them look at me with surprise. I say, here is the right question: “When will the world catch up to what Africa is doing with AI?”

But before I dive into AI, let me take you on a geography lesson. Africa is big. It's 54 countries, 1.6 billion people, 3,000 languages, not counting dialects. And Africa is young. Sixty percent of the world's youth is going to be African by the year 2050. These are digital natives, incredible digital skills. But it wasn't always like this. Thirty years ago, 75 percent of Africans had never had a phone ring. There were more telephone lines in New York City than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

In 30 years, here's what has happened. We now have a billion mobile phone connections. We now have 1.1 billion mobile money accounts. That's up from only 300 million 10 years ago. It's driving financial inclusion at an unprecedented scale. Today, if I needed to pay my barber, the food vendor, my utility bill, it's easy, accessible, convenient, and cheap. I use my mobile money account, whether it's EcoCash or M-Pesa.

Africa's demographic dividend is also one of its biggest challenges. Our biggest challenge is youth unemployment. And I think it's one challenge that AI is uniquely placed to solve. Let me take you into the future. Please meet Yemurai. Yemurai is 24. She's tech savvy, but up until now, her future would have been bleak. She would have been as unemployed as any of her peers but for the fact that she has just graduated from one of the AI academies that we have on the continent.

Early morning, Yemurai is teaching math, using AI to over 200 students across five schools. By midday, Yemurai has joined the local nurse at a health clinic helping with diagnosis, malaria, TB, bilharzia. And by the evening, she's taking photos of soil samples and diseased plants, able to tell them what fertilizer, what seeds to use. Yields are now up 40 percent where she lives. Yemurai is not a teacher. She's not a nurse. She's not an agronomist. She's what we call an AI-amplified community entrepreneur. She's earning three times more than her peers. She's solving the problem of the shortage of teachers, doctors, and agronomists that is so pervasive across most of Africa.

My name is Hardy Pemhiwa, I am the CEO of Cassava Technologies. We are the company that has literally connected Africa. It's a map that shows 110,000 kilometers of fiber that we have built across the African continent, literally from Cape Town to Cairo. We are bringing internet to more than 500 million people. And we have now added a platform of interconnected data centers that are AI-ready.

Our plan now is to build Africa's first AI factory using local data, algorithms, local compute capacity to produce local intelligence. We're building an AI ecosystem for those that were previously excluded. Powered with fiber broadband and now GPUs that we've been able to get from Nvidia, we are bringing to life AI infrastructure for Africa to compete. This is Africa's AI revolution. It's not about substitution, it's about multiplication. We want to amplify human capacity. Already, we're powering more than 12,000 AI developers, more than 1,100 startups, and 285 universities. 67,000 of Africa's largest enterprises are all embracing this vision of an AI-powered future.

Because the next one billion users of AI are not going to use AI the same way that the first one billion have been using it. They are coming from places where a single AI-amplified human must do the work of 10. They are building AI to teach math in Swahili, in Ndebele, in Zulu, in Shona. They are building AI to detect counterfeit medicines and to diagnose crops. In Africa, constraints have always driven innovation. That's why mobile money came from Africa. AI models that are trained on African realities are more robust, more efficient, and more inclusive.

In Africa, we are deploying AI to serve the many and not the few. We are optimizing AI for impact and not for social media clicks. The future of AI is not just going to be written in Silicon Valley. It's going to be written in the Silicon Savanna in Kenya. It's going to be written in thousands of villages. In London, they are worrying about whether teachers are going to lose their jobs because of AI. In Africa, we're embracing AI to solve the shortage of teachers. In New York, they're building algorithms to trade stocks faster. For us, it's about AI that can increase crop yields and reduce mortality. This is not just Africa's AI moment. This is AI's Africa moment.