Yet, for African marketing and business leaders, there is a profound disconnect between the "Alp-top" discourse and the ground-level reality of emerging markets.

The Davos narrative is shaped by Western anxieties: disruption of legacy systems, displacement of ageing workforces and the erosion of saturated consumer attention economies. It is a defensive posture — one of damage control.

For Africa, this perspective is not merely incomplete; it is a strategic distraction. In our markets, the absence of legacy infrastructure is not a deficit  — it is a form of structural arbitrage.

The Leapfrog Logic: Beyond Legacy Debt

We have seen this pattern before. Africa did not disrupt the landline; we bypassed it for mobile. We did not wait for the expansion of physical bank branches; we built a financial ecosystem on the SIM card. M-Pesa's success was not a feat of "faster banking", but a solution to an institutional vacuum.

The same principle now applies to AI. While the West negotiates its "legacy debt", African CMOs can build AI-native organisations from the ground up.

Fragmentation as High-Fidelity Training Data

Davos views geopolitical and market fragmentation as a problem to be solved. In Africa, fragmentation is our operating reality. A single campaign in South Africa must navigate 11 official languages, disparate cultural nuances and varying tiers of digital literacy.

In this context, Western "personalisation" often looks like superficial data-mining — adjusting a name in a subject line. Conversely, AI-powered personalisation in African markets requires a far more sophisticated heuristic: content that adapts across language, culture and socioeconomic context simultaneously.

The AI models capable of navigating the high-entropy environments of Johannesburg, Lagos and Nairobi will inherently be more robust than those trained on homogeneous datasets from the West. Our complexity is our moat.

The Skills Gap and Strategic AI Literacy

The WEF highlights the risk of technological displacement. However, in emerging markets, we are not replacing established skills; we are creating new ones.

At Brave Group, our deployment of FORGE — our AI-powered marketing platform — has revealed that the ultimate competitive advantage is not the software itself, but Strategic AI Literacy. This is the ability of a team to know when to lean into algorithmic efficiency and when to override the machine to protect long-term brand equity.

Organisations that invest in this literacy now will achieve a temporary but significant moat. In a world where every bank can license the same LLM, the winner is the one who integrates it into a superior decision-making framework.

Efficiency as an Unlock, Not a Goal

In mature economies, AI is often viewed through the lens of marginal productivity gains — doing the same with less. In Africa, AI-driven efficiency is an "unlock". It frees up the capital and cognitive energy required to invest in the creative, contextual and strategic work that global giants cannot automate.

For the African CMO, the goal is not just reducing "cost-per-acquisition" (CPA). The goal is to use that efficiency to fund long-term brand-building that creates demand where none existed.

The Governance Mandate: De-Risking the Future

The one area where Davos is correct is the necessity of AI governance. However, for us, this is not a philosophical exercise — it is hard-nosed risk management. Ungoverned AI in a trust-deficient environment is a recipe for brand suicide.

We see three distinct risks:

  • Brand Risk: Algorithms that violate cultural norms or alienate segments through unintended bias.
  • Regulatory Risk: Navigating the intersection of POPIA, GDPR and evolving data frameworks across the continent.
  • Operational Risk: "Algorithmic drift", where systems optimised for narrow clicks destroy the broader relationships those clicks were meant to represent.

At Brave Group, we have embedded governance into FORGE as a navigation system, not a brake. This ensures algorithmic transparency and cultural sensitivity are part of the output, not an afterthought.

From Dialogue to Action

The strategic question facing the African C-suite is not whether to use AI. The question is whether we will import Western playbooks that don't fit our context, or shape a transformation that acknowledges our unique dialogic environment.

The future of AI in marketing will not be written in the Swiss Alps. It will be authored by leaders who understand that real competitive advantage lies at the intersection of sophisticated technology and deep market intelligence.

The conversation that matters is happening right here, in boardrooms where leaders are asking: how do we use these tools to build brands that are not just efficient, but enduring?

This is the dialogue we should be having.

For more information, visit www.bravegroup.co.za. You can also follow Brave Group on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, or on TikTok. 

*Image courtesy of contributor