The Chairman of inq. Group, a Pan-African edge technology provider, Andile Ngcaba, has highlighted new jobs being created by Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially for the young ones.
According to him, contrary to the belief that AI will take people’s jobs, it has created new jobs, which include prompt engineering, annotation, and data labelling, among others.
Speaking in Lagos at an event to introduce the group’s new CEO, Glad Dibetso, Ngcaba shared past experiences of how new technologies had created fears of job losses, but they ended up creating new jobs.
He said the same is already happening with AI. He, however, noted that these new jobs also require people to acquire new skills in those areas.
Technology changes
Highlighting some technology changes in the past and how they have created new jobs, Ngcaba said:
- “In the cycles of technology, you will realise that there was a time when there was what we called analogue telephoning.
- “If I’m going to phone you, I would first phone the exchange and the exchange will put me through to you.
- “There were thousands of people working at the exchange at that time just to connect one person’s call to another.
- “And when the digitalization of communications happened, whereby I could phone you directly, without going via the exchange, people said, this is going to remove jobs but guess what? More jobs were created.
- “When the only way to communicate was copper to your house. We didn’t have mobile phones.
- “And when mobile phones came, people said what’s going to happen to people who were working in the copper market? Are mobile phones not going to take our jobs?
- “No. In fact, the jobs increased because with the new technology came fibre optics and new people were involved.
- “And the phone stopped just to be used as a means to connect people to communicate by voice, but it became a computer and more people would work and build applications on their phones.”
New jobs from AI
While emphasising AI is going to determine the future of work as it is creating new opportunities for people to work, he said:
- “For example, it has now created what we call prompt engineers, which are new types of engineers that we see today in the market.
- “There are new types of jobs being created by artificial intelligence in the area of annotation and labelling of data. These are jobs that did not exist whatsoever before.
- “So, AI is creating new jobs. It is going to require us to introduce new types of skills to young people, who will work in the field of annotation in the field of labelling in the field of prompt engineering, in the field of analytics in the field of managing huge volumes of data, and in the field of running and building algorithms.”
AI solution for Nigeria
Meanwhile, the inq. Chairman said the company has just introduced AI-powered solutions for the Nigerian energy market.
According to him, the product will be integrated into the distribution network of energy distribution companies (DisCos), enabling real-time analysis of energy flow and tracking energy leaks.
This announcement follows Inq’s recent reveal of two homegrown AI products it released for its 10 markets across Africa and Asia: DocAi and VisionAI.
DocAI is a tool that digitises processes for businesses and allows them to use area-specific, deep-learning optical character recognition (OCR) to upload scanned documents and extract valuable information.
Vision AI allows enterprises to deploy AI-powered image recognition technologies across camera surveillance systems enabling real-time analytics and alerts.
Inq Group has operated in Nigeria for about four years, and in that time has provided enterprise-level cloud, connectivity, and IoT solutions for businesses in the country.
The company says it has also built proprietary large language models that are powering its AI-solutions suite today.
