How African Women Entrepreneurs Can Embrace AI for Business Growth and Scale

AI in African Entrepreneurship:

The Productivity and Revenue Gap You Can’t Ignore

The ineffective use of AI affects a business’s productivity and revenue. Research by McKinsey shows that generative AI could add $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy, largely through improved productivity in marketing, customer operations, and business decision-making areas where most small and growing businesses operate. For women entrepreneurs in this cohort and beyond, the underuse of AI creates a critical gap between the tools available to them and the daily business complexities they face. Every day without effective AI adoption is a day of lost efficiency, time, and potential revenue compared to competitors already integrating AI into their workflows.

This usage gap is exactly what Cohort 9 data is reflecting and what they must now close. Abimbola Adebakin, AWEC Cohort 1 alumna, mentor, Founder & CEO, Advantage Health Africa, demonstrates what it looks like to move from access to full integration. She has effectively optimized AI across her business, including through a highly interactive, AI-enabled website that reflects how deeply AI is embedded in both her operations and customer experience.

 “The decision to adopt AI was driven by the growing operational challenge of scaling beyond our existing systems, processes, and capacity,” Abimbola notes. As Advantage Health Africa expanded its digital health products, the team began to struggle with fragmented updates, manual coordination, and repetitive customer queries.

“Our wake-up call was the need to manage growth and complexity better.” That challenge became the entry point for AI, not as a luxury tool, but as an operational necessity.

AI For Customers: From Transactions To Care

On the customer side, AI has expanded what Advantage Health Africa is able to offer beyond traditional service delivery. “We are using AI across our applications through chatbots, wellness messages, and medication safety features such as drug interaction guidance.” This shift has allowed the business to move from reactive support to proactive engagement. “It is helping us move beyond just selling medicines to supporting customers through their health journey.” AI tools like Intercom Fin, Tidio, and ManyChat mirror this capability for other businesses looking to improve customer experience and response time.  Not sure where to start with your AI journey? Pick one of the tools that suits your needs and test it out this week.

“The integration of AI tools into my business is helping us understand our customers better and serve them excellently.”

Beyond support, AI is now central to how Abimbola’s team understands user behaviour. "We are using AI to understand customers through analytics from chatbot usage on our health applications.” By analysing questions, medication searches, and recurring concerns, the team identifies patterns that directly inform product and service improvements. “If many users are asking the same questions, it tells us exactly where we need to improve.”

"Beyond Operations, AI Is Playing A Critical Role In Customer Insight And Service Delivery"

“We take feedback seriously, and when we act on it, we see a significant boost in sales.” AI is also used proactively through wellness messaging, medication reminders, preventive health education, and drug interaction guidance. Importantly, Abimbola emphasizes that this is not about replacing healthcare professionals. “The goal is not to replace healthcare professionals, but to increase our efficiency and guide our customers responsibly and encourage them to seek expert help when needed.”

Staff Corner #WeAreAWEC

Didi Agbahor (AWEC, Deputy Managing Director )

At AWEC, we are always excited to walk in the trenches with female founders as they build and scale their businesses. As a cooperative, we draw strength from the knowledge, collaboration, and effort that each alumna contributes because investing in women is one of the most powerful catalysts for sustainable development.  That is why AI matters more today than ever before and continues to be an important part of the AWEC learning experience. Our women entrepreneurs are ready to build smarter across the 23 industries they represent, from beauty and cosmetics, food processing and agriculture, to healthcare and real estate.

More than half of this cohort (51%) are in the growth stage, actively trying to scale while managing increasing complexity. Full integration of growth management platforms can help speed up the scaling stage by improving operational efficiency and reducing pesky bottlenecks. 31% are still building traction, figuring out what works and how to stay consistent. At this stage, the entrepreneurs are encouraged to test beginner and free AI tools to help them with customer feedback and ultimately make better decisions with their products and services. For entrepreneurs starting out, simpler tools like Notion or ClickUp can provide a solid foundation for structure before advancing to more complex builds. The 15% who are expanding into new markets and stretching their systems even further can wield the power of advanced AI to avoid common pitfalls of business expansion. 

Through every stage, a founder has to handle the growing complexity without immediately needing a bigger team or incurring higher costs. AI can help simplify operations, improve how decisions are made, and create systems that support growth instead of slowing it down. In many ways, AI becomes the “middle management” support layer that allows the business to keep up with its own ambition.

Start small. Pick one area of your business, whether it is customer support, marketing, or internal organization, and for a quarter, test a simple AI tool that solves an actual problem. The goal is not to do everything at once, but to build gradually, learn quickly, and scale intentionally.