For the past two years, the world has been in the honeymoon phase of artificial intelligence. Most of us use AI daily, but we use it reactively. We ask a chatbot a question, it retrieves information, drafts an email, or summarises a document. We are the drivers; the AI is the passenger.
But the landscape is shifting. We are leaving the era of the chatbot and entering the era of agentic AI.
In this new phase, AI becomes autonomous. Instead of just waiting for a prompt, an AI agent can be assigned a specific objective and given the agency to execute it within a tightly prescriptive fashion.
Consider a high-volume call centre: rather than a human agent answering the same rote query five hundred times a day, an AI agent handles the routine tasks autonomously, handing off only the complex, high-value interactions to the humans in the chain.
It is a shift from ‘AI as a tool’ to ‘AI as a teammate’.
The African Opportunity: Innovation Born of Necessity
For African businesses, this shift is not just a trend; it is a tactical advantage. In the African context, we often operate under resource and skills constraints. We have to be smarter, more agile, and more creative in how we operate.
Historically, Africa has leapfrogged legacy technologies – jumping straight to mobile banking, for example. Agentic AI offers a similar opportunity. We are seeing a rise in citizen developers – not the usual IT gang, but business users who are leveraging these tools to solve immediate operational problems.
We are already seeing this in action. For example, a client in Nigeria is currently utilising AI agents to handle document verification. By automating this labour-intensive process, they have freed up their human agents to focus entirely on customer service and growth. This isn’t just efficiency; it is phenomenal business scaling without the traditional overhead.
Guardrails Before Gas: The Security Imperative
Excitement must be tempered with strategy, however. Many businesses are nervous about AI, and rightly so. Without a clear company strategy, employees will inevitably use public AI tools to do their jobs, inadvertently exposing sensitive company data to public Large Language Models (LLMs).
You cannot simply ignore AI. If you do not provide the tools, your staff will find their own, leading to shadow AI and significant security risks.
The foundation of ROI is security. This requires a maturity assessment to understand where you currently sit. Do you have the right role-based access? Is your data classified and protected? You need a narrative and a strategy that allows users to innovate without exposing the business.
Unlocking ROI: Top-Down Strategy, Bottom-Up Adoption
So, how do you ensure a return on investment (ROI)?
It starts with the “why.” You must define the use case – whether it is growing profits, acquiring customers, or improving customer experience (CX). If the ROI doesn’t stack up, the technology becomes impossible to sustain.
Successful implementation requires a dual approach:
- Bottom-up adoption: Real value comes when you empower your teams. Prompt engineering is a skill that requires practice. You cannot expect sustainable uptake if you don’t train your people to get the best out of these solutions.
- Top-down strategy: Leadership must define the appetite for risk and the strategic direction. Without this, the business risks being left behind.
Next Steps
The most successful organisations we work with are those that build internal communities – spaces where employees share prompts, use cases, and “wins.” It takes on a life of its own as people share how they are making their work lives easier.
At ADG, we help businesses unpack these ideas. From running hackathons to identify high-impact use cases, to conducting maturity assessments that ensure your data foundation is secure, we help make the abstract promise of AI tangible.
The agentic AI era is here. The question is not whether your business will use it, but whether you will direct it to work for you.