Strategic Intelligence for Global Impact

For the past few years, the corporate conversation about artificial intelligence has focused on adoption. Which tools should we use? What can we automate? How quickly can we deploy? What are our competitors doing? These were reasonable questions when organisations were discovering what the technology could do. They are no longer enough.

The consequences accumulate relentlessly. Currency depreciation raised public debt across sub-Saharan Africa by up to 10 percentage points of GDP between 2020 and 2022 alone. In Ethiopia, the birr's 30 per cent slide against the dollar by mid-2024 raised the effective debt burden by an estimated 35 per cent over the preceding two years a near-ten-billion-dollar increase in real debt-service obligations on a country already classified as in debt distress. In Malawi, a 26 per cent kwacha devaluation fed directly into inflation while simultaneously raising the local-currency cost of every outstanding dollar obligation, compressing fiscal space for health and education in a single depreciation event.

The risks that safety advocates are raising are not imaginary. Alignment failures, systems that pursue objectives their designers did not intend, are a genuine engineering problem. The concentration of AI development in a handful of companies across two countries creates power asymmetries with real implications for accountability. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, was direct: AI "is used to watch us, judge us, and control us" in ways that people often cannot challenge. Surveillance at scale, predictive policing, algorithmic decision-making in welfare and immigration these are not hypothetical risks. They are operational realities in systems already running.