Olubayo Adekanmbi
Dr. Olubayo Adekanmbi is one of Africa’s leading voices in artificial intelligence, inclusive innovation, and digital transformation. He is the Founder and CEO of Data Science Nigeria and Co-Founder and CEO of EqualyzAI, an African AI company building voice-first, agentic intelligence that works in local languages, dialects, and accents, on any device, with or without the internet. Through EqualyzAI, he is helping pioneer a new model of inclusive AI, where voice becomes the primary interface for intelligence and action, particularly for underserved communities often excluded from digital innovation.
With more than 24 years of executive and technical experience, Dr. Adekanmbi has held senior leadership roles at MTN Nigeria, MTN Group South Africa, and Airtel Africa UK, leading strategy, analytics, innovation, and digital transformation across more than 30 African markets and impacting over 300 million people. He is widely recognized for combining deep technical expertise with practical business and policy leadership. He co-facilitated Nigeria’s National AI Strategy with more than 120 global experts and has contributed to international efforts on AI safety, governance, and responsible innovation with organizations including GSMA, Meta, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, the Tony Blair Institute, and the UK AI Safety Institute. He also served as a senior adviser to the International Scientific Report 2025 on Advanced AI Safety led by Yoshua Bengio.
A strong advocate for AI inclusion through language, Dr. Adekanmbi has led major AI localization efforts, including the creation of AI knowledge and learning resources in Hausa and Yoruba, two Nigerian languages spoken by over 100 million people, with support from Google.org. This work reflects his commitment to ensuring that AI understanding and access are not limited to English-speaking or digitally privileged populations, but are extended to communities in their own languages and cultural contexts.
Dr. Adekanmbi’s work has earned global recognition. Five of the AI solutions he has led were selected among the UNESCO/IRCAI Top 100 AI Projects for Social Good, and he received the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Global Grand Challenge Award for developing AI-driven financial inclusion tools for low-income populations. A respected researcher and thought leader, he has authored and presented work at leading conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, CVPR, and ICML. He holds a PhD from the University of London, has trained more than 500,000 young Africans in AI and data science through Data Science Nigeria, and is the author of several books, including Africa’s first AI book for children.
