Nigeria faces AI crossroads as 9m jobs risk automation without local innovation

Nigeria could lose about nine million routine jobs to artificial intelligence by the end of the decade unless it urgently builds its own AI technologies and equips workers with new digital skills, according to a new report that warns the country risks becoming a permanent consumer of foreign innovation.

The study argues that while AI is expected to create roughly 11 million new technology-enabled jobs, those opportunities will only materialise if Nigeria shifts from merely adopting artificial intelligence to developing indigenous AI models, datasets and computing infrastructure.

The warning is contained in ‘Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Nigeria: A Macro and Micro Economic Review’, authored by Debola Ibiyode, founder and executive director of the AI Empowerment Foundation and chief executive of CarbonAI, and conducted by OLGNova alongside AI in Action Now.

The report identifies banking, public administration and clerical services as among the sectors most exposed to automation, where repetitive tasks are increasingly being handled by AI systems.

Without aggressive investment in workforce reskilling, the report says, millions of workers could be displaced even as new AI-powered jobs emerge in software engineering, machine learning, data science, robotics and digital services.

“Nigeria is not failing at AI; it is adopting AI faster than it is building the institutional, infrastructural and human foundations needed to sustain and own that adoption,” Ibiyode said in the report.

The findings come as Nigeria experiences one of the fastest rates of AI adoption in Africa. More than 70 percent of Nigerians have already interacted with generative AI tools, while 93 percent of organisations surveyed have adopted AI in some form. Nearly one-third have integrated the technology into advanced business operations.

Yet the report argues that high adoption alone will not protect jobs or generate lasting economic value.

Instead, Nigeria risks becoming increasingly dependent on foreign-built AI models, cloud infrastructure and software platforms, exporting valuable local data while importing the technologies that analyse it.

That dependence, the study warns, leaves businesses and public institutions vulnerable to changing licensing policies, service disruptions and external control over critical digital infrastructure.

The report describes this imbalance as Nigeria’s biggest AI challenge, arguing that the country has become an enthusiastic consumer of artificial intelligence but remains a limited producer of the foundational technologies powering the global AI economy.

Despite the concerns, the study highlights significant progress already being made across several sectors.

In healthcare, AI-powered diagnostic tools are helping doctors analyse radiological scans, detect birth asphyxia in newborns and expand mental healthcare through intelligent chatbots, helping bridge the country’s shortage of psychiatrists.

Agriculture is also benefiting. AI advisory platforms are increasing crop yields by between 20 percent and 30 percent while reducing production costs. Predictive analytics, route optimisation and automated maintenance are helping minimise food waste and improve supply chain efficiency.

Government agencies are beginning to embrace the technology as well. The Federal Civil Service has deployed Service Wise GPT to improve public service delivery, while AI-powered traffic management pilots in Lagos and Abuja have reportedly reduced peak-hour travel times by about 20 percent.

Nigeria is also strengthening its academic presence in AI research. According to the report, local researchers have produced more than 11,600 AI-related academic publications, with the University of Ibadan leading national output.

However, the authors argue that research alone is insufficient if it does not translate into commercial AI products and globally competitive technology companies.

Another major concern is language inclusion.

Most advanced AI systems are trained predominantly on English-language datasets, making them less effective in understanding indigenous Nigerian languages such as Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. Without local datasets, millions of Nigerians could be excluded from the full benefits of AI, while foreign platforms continue to dominate the market.

To avoid that outcome, the report calls for a national strategy centred on what it describes as sovereign AI.

It recommends increased public and private investment in domestic computing infrastructure, indigenous language datasets, AI innovation hubs and affordable financing for local startups. Universities are urged to move beyond teaching students how to use AI tools and instead train engineers capable of building foundation models and advanced AI systems.

The report concludes that Nigeria’s high AI adoption rate has given the country a head start, but warns that the real economic prize will belong to nations that own the technology rather than simply consume it.

For Nigeria, the next chapter of the AI revolution may therefore be defined not by how many jobs artificial intelligence replaces, but by how quickly the country creates the innovation needed to replace those jobs with new ones of its own.