Whose intelligence?
Building Agentic AI in Africa without frontier-model dependency.
The promise of Agentic AI is seductive: autonomous systems that perceive, plan, and act, thereby reducing the friction between human intent and outcome. However, Agentic AI is arriving in Africa on someone else's terms.
Building agentic systems today almost inevitably means building on frontier models trained predominantly on Western data, optimized for Western languages, and aligned to Western values; yet deployed to negotiate, decide, and act on behalf of African users. Every API call, every default behavior, every quietly embedded assumption carries a worldview that was not built with Africa in mind.
This session takes a positional stance — through a startup pitch, four positional talks and a structured fishbowl dialogue, we pressure-test four tensions: cultural alignment, infrastructure dependency, value extraction, and the capability trap — working toward a community-driven position on sovereign agentic AI for Africa. Outputs will be compiled into an open preprint.