I’d like to make an assertion that has been sitting with me for some time: the communications industry may have spent the last two years asking the wrong question about AI. I say this in no way as any kind of expert on the matter, but as a learning practitioner trying to learn better.

Africa has a population of over 1.4 billion people, spread across 54 countries and home to somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 languages. Nigeria alone accounts for more than 500 of them. Yet in many global communications briefs, this continent gets a single line: "African audiences."

The media sector is undergoing one of its most significant transformations since the rise of digital platforms. Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer experimental. It is now embedded in newsroom operations, shaping how news is produced, distributed, and consumed.