Bayo Adekanmbi is the founder and CEO of Data Scientists Network (DSNai), an organization that has trained over 500,000 people in artificial intelligence and data science.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What is the most valuable lesson you have learned from building DSNai?
Talent is everywhere, but opportunity isn’t. Before we talk about great products, we need people. Ideas live in people’s minds and must be trained, supported, and inspired. If we invest more in people and focus less on short-term benefits, we will develop more impactful long-term solutions that improve the quality of life worldwide.
What is the most exciting part of your job?
Seeing how lines of code, math, and statistics can be organized into meaningful sequences of instructions to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems. I am fascinated every time a solution I conceptualize or an idea I mobilized my team to work on is applied in the real world. It is exhilarating and fulfilling to see how computational power can make a difference in advancing humanity.
What is the most pressing problem that AI can solve for Africans?
I categorize the problems into two. The first relates to how users can best access and apply AI in their native languages. While I appreciate the effort on text-based language modeling, most African languages are undocumented. So, we need more voice-based language learning systems, which could impact last-mile health delivery, personalized education, financial inclusion, agricultural support, etc.
The second is location. We don’t have a perfect addressing system, which impacts our ability to provide precise emergency response, location-based support, and social intervention planning. Location understanding will optimize resource allocation, development-related efforts, and evidence-based planning. AI can help fix this.
The use of computational knowledge for language and location has now intersected in the domain of geo-semantics, GeoNLP, and GeoLLM.
