As the adoption of artificial intelligence increases across the world,  talent management professional Oluwaseyi Akintola believes that Nigeria is at a crossroads in the global artificial intelligence race. While the country boasts one of the world’s youngest populations, she warns that inadequate digital skills, outdated curricula and weak infrastructure are leaving many graduates unprepared for an economy increasingly shaped by AI.

In this interview with The Guardian, Akintola discusses the widening gap between education and industry needs, the risks of job displacement and brain drain, and why AI literacy should become a core part of learning at every level.

She also outlines the policy, regulatory and investment decisions he says are needed to ensure Nigeria becomes an AI creator rather than merely a consumer.

Nigeria seems to be falling behind in AI workforce readiness. What are the biggest gaps you see today between the skills Nigerian employers need and the skills many graduates currently possess?

Nigeria is falling behind on the AI workforce readiness challenge due to so many factors. While young Nigerians are deeply curious about AI, the infrastructure is yet to be put into place to develop these skills further. The problem is deliberate capability-building; over 85% of graduates still lack foundational digital skills, and employers are consistently saying that degrees alone aren’t translating into workplace readiness.

What’s widening the gap is that job requirements are changing rapidly due to technological advancements, and these jobs require entirely different skills from those that many graduates possess. And our university curricula haven’t caught up. The honest truth is that Nigeria has the demographic advantage to win in an AI economy, but that window is narrowing.

We need a serious pivot from credential-chasing to applied, practical skill-building;  and we needed it yesterday.

Nigeria has one of the world’s youngest populations. Do you think the country is treating AI as an urgent economic issue, or is it still being viewed mainly as a technology trend?

Honestly? It’s still being treated more as a trend than an emergency. And that’s the danger. Nigeria has an extraordinary demographic asset, being one of the youngest populations in the world, but a young population without the right skills isn’t an advantage; it’s a liability waiting to materialise.

The government has made some moves; there’s a national AI strategy, and there are training targets. But when you look at the scale — 100,000 AI professionals targeted in a workforce of tens of millions: it doesn’t match the urgency of the moment. What treating AI as an economic emergency actually looks like: restructuring curricula, closing the infrastructure gap in rural schools, investing heavily in infrastructure and creating deliberate pathways from education into these new roles. We’re not there yet. The rhetoric is ahead of the reality.

Global South workers could be left on the margins of the AI economy. What specific risks do Nigerian workers face if the country fails to build local AI capacity and talent pipelines?

The risks are existential at a macro level. If Nigeria doesn’t build local AI capacity, you end up with a two-tier economy, where AI-powered productivity is imported, owned by foreign firms or a thin domestic elite, and the majority of workers are competing for an ever-shrinking pool of low-skill, automatable jobs. That’s not a technology problem; that’s a poverty trap.

More specifically, the sectors that employ the most Nigerians are retail, financial services, agriculture, and logistics, which are all being restructured by AI right now. Workers in those sectors without AI-adjacent skills face displacement, with nowhere to move up.

And then there’s the brain drain dynamic: the Nigerians who do acquire strong AI skills will be recruited globally, because that talent is scarce everywhere. Coupled with immigration, young, skilled Nigerians are migrating at an alarming rate.  So you risk simultaneously losing your best-trained people and being unable to replace them. The compounding effect of all three — displacement, stagnation, and brain drain is what makes this a genuine economic emergency, not just a workforce conversation.

Many Nigerians worry that AI will eliminate jobs in sectors such as media, customer service, banking, and administration. Do you see AI as a net threat or a net opportunity for Nigeria’s labour market over the next decade?

Net opportunity, but only conditionally. And that condition is everything. The countries that will come out ahead are the ones that treat AI as infrastructure, the same way we once treated roads and electricity.

For Nigeria specifically, the opportunity is significant: AI can compress decades of productivity growth, it can extend services into underserved communities, it can give a talented young Nigerian in Kano or Owerri access to tools that previously only existed in Silicon Valley. But here’s the honest part: that outcome isn’t automatic. If we remain primarily consumers of AI built elsewhere, then yes, the threat narrative wins.

Jobs in customer service, back-office banking, data entry, basic media production,  those are already being automated, and they won’t come back. The question is whether we’re building the replacement layer fast enough. I lean towards opportunity, but only if we stop waiting for the technology to slow down and start treating workforce transformation as a national priority today, not in the next policy cycle.

You have written about Nigerian students using AI tools without necessarily understanding how AI works. Should AI literacy become a compulsory part of primary, secondary, or university education in Nigeria, and what should such a curriculum look like?

Compulsory and at all three levels, not just university. Because if we wait until university, we’ve already lost a decade of formation. At the primary level, it doesn’t need to be technical; it’s about building intuition: what is AI, where does it show up in daily life, how do you question it rather than just trust it.

At the secondary level, you introduce applied literacy, how to use AI tools responsibly, how to spot bias in outputs, and basic data concepts. By university, you move into domain-specific fluency: what does AI mean for law, for medicine, for journalism, for agriculture? Every faculty, not just computer science.

The risk of doing nothing is what I’ve seen already: students using AI as a shortcut without understanding its limitations, which produces graduates who are dependent on a technology they can’t interrogate or improve. That’s the worst possible outcome. We’d be building a workforce that’s not just underprepared, but actively misled about what they’re capable of. AI literacy done right doesn’t replace critical thinking; it sharpens it

AI systems are mostly built around Western data and assumptions. How can Nigeria ensure that its languages, cultures, and local realities are represented in the next generation of AI tools?

This is one of the most underdiscussed risks in the entire global AI conversation. When AI systems are trained predominantly on Western data, they don’t just reflect Western assumptions; they actively marginalise everything outside of them. For Nigeria, that means Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and hundreds of other languages being treated as edge cases in systems that are supposed to serve a country of over 200 million people.

The consequences are practical, not just cultural: a healthcare AI that doesn’t understand local disease patterns, a financial AI that can’t assess creditworthiness in informal economies, a legal AI trained on Anglo-American jurisprudence. So what’s the answer? Three things.

First, Nigeria needs to invest in local datasets, deliberate, funded programmes to digitise Nigerian languages, document local knowledge systems, and build an open data infrastructure.

Second, we need Nigerian researchers and engineers at the table where these models are being built, not just consuming what others build.

Third, government and industry procurement decisions matter enormously; prioritising AI tools that are locally adapted over cheap imported defaults sends a market signal that representation has value.

The broader point is this: if Nigeria doesn’t actively build itself into the next generation of AI, the next generation of AI will be built without Nigeria in mind

AI without ethics can be bad for business. As Nigerian companies increasingly deploy AI in recruitment, lending, and customer service, what regulatory guardrails should policymakers put in place now before problems emerge?

This is an area I feel strongly about, and the urgency is real because deployment is already outpacing regulation. Nigerian companies are already using AI in hiring and lending decisions that directly affect people’s livelihoods, and right now, there is very little accountability if those systems discriminate, exclude, or simply get it wrong. So what needs to happen?

First, algorithmic transparency: if an AI system is making or influencing a consequential decision about a person, that person has a right to know, and regulators have a right to audit it.

Second, sector-specific guardrails: the CBN, SEC, and NCC need AI-specific frameworks, not just general data protection guidance. NDPR is a start, but it wasn’t designed for the decisions AI is now making.

Third, mandatory bias audits before deployment in high-stakes contexts, such as recruitment, credit scoring, and insurance. Not after harm is reported. Before. And fourth, liability clarity: when an AI system causes harm, who is responsible? The vendor, the company that deployed it, or both?

That question needs a legal answer before the first major scandal forces a rushed one. The window to get ahead of this is narrow. Reactive regulation is always more expensive than proactive regulation, in public trust, in economic damage, and ultimately in lives.

If you had the attention of President Bola Tinubu and state governors for five minutes, what three immediate actions would you recommend to prevent Nigeria from becoming merely a consumer of AI rather than a creator and exporter of AI solutions?

Five minutes with the President and governors would be such an honour! But  I’d skip the preamble and go straight to three things. First, declare AI infrastructure a national priority on par with roads and power. That means funded, time-bound commitments to connectivity in schools, not just urban centres, because you cannot build an AI workforce on a foundation of patchy internet and overcrowded classrooms.

The talent is there. The infrastructure isn’t. Second, create a Nigerian AI Sovereign Fund, dedicated capital that backs homegrown AI startups, funds local dataset development, and keeps Nigerian-built solutions competitive against heavily subsidised Western and Chinese alternatives. Every serious AI nation is putting state capital behind its ecosystem.

Nigeria cannot leave this entirely to the market. Third, and most immediately actionable, mandate that every federal university produce a domain-specific AI curriculum within eighteen months, tied to funding. Not a general computer science course. Specific tracks for AI in agriculture, healthcare, law, and finance. That’s where Nigerian AI can be distinctive and exportable, not by trying to out-compete OpenAI, but by building solutions that understand Nigerian realities better than any foreign model ever will.

The honest message I’d leave them with is this: the demographic window Nigeria has right now is not permanent. A young population ages. The time to convert that asset into AI capability is now — not after the next election cycle.