Microsoft has warned that Africa risks becoming largely a consumer of artificial intelligence rather than a creator and beneficiary of the technology.

Akua Gyekye, Microsoft’s Head of Government Affairs for Africa, issued the warning in a statement on Thursday in Lagos.

She cited Microsoft’s Global AI Diffusion Report for the first quarter of 2026, stressing that decisions made by African countries today will determine whether the continent captures the value created by AI or merely consumes technologies developed elsewhere.

According to Gyekye, generative AI usage among working-age populations is 27.5% in the Global North, compared with 15.4% in the Global South, with the gap continuing to widen.

Gyekye said the debate around AI in Africa has shifted from whether the continent will embrace the technology to whether it can deploy it responsibly, confidently and at scale.

“The choices Africa makes now will determine whether it captures the value created by AI or simply consumes it,” she said.

She said African governments and businesses should have the flexibility to choose between frontier, open and specialised AI models, without being locked into a single technological ecosystem.

“The strongest partnerships will be those that build enduring African capability,” she said.

She referenced African Development Bank estimates that inclusive AI development and deployment could add as much as $1 trillion to Africa’s GDP by 2035, describing the projection as both a measure of the opportunity before the continent and the economic cost of failing to act.

On cybersecurity, Gyekye said it must remain central to responsible AI adoption as the technology becomes increasingly integrated into public services, financial systems, healthcare and critical infrastructure.

She also pointed to LINGUA Africa, a $5.5 million initiative involving the Masakhane African Languages Hub, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, the Gates Foundation and Google.org.

According to her, the initiative addresses one of the major barriers to AI inclusion in Africa by expanding access to AI technologies across the continent’s diverse languages.