Simon Bransfield-Garth was writing his doctoral research on artificial neural networks at Cambridge in 1985 — forty years before most people had heard of AI. In this episode, he traces that journey through Myriad Solutions (a vector processor company that preceded the GPU era), Symbian (the smartphone OS that defined the pre-iPhone world), Cellcrypt (mobile voice security for governments worldwide), and Azuri Technologies (pay-as-you-go solar for 250,000+ households across nine African markets) — and explains how all of it led him to found Akili AI in 2024.

We discuss: why 42% of Kenyan internet users use ChatGPT but most Kenyan boards think they have zero AI in their business; what Akili Snapshot reveals when you run it on a typical EastAfrican financial institution; how Akili AI took a loan processing workflow from two weeks to five minutes; and why Simon believes the biggest risk for Africa is not adopting AI too fast — it is adopting it too slowly.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

03:10 Simon's early career — Cambridge, neural networks, Myriad Solutions

08:35 The Symbian years and the lesson of a platform that missed the shift

12:53 Cellcrypt and the intersection of security and AI

15:36 Azuri Technologies and a decade of building in Africa

19:34 Why Akili AI focuses on financial services

21:22 AI adoption in Kenya — the consumer/corporate gap

27:51 The three things AI actually is — and why governance is the hard part

31:45 Introducing Akili Snapshot and Akili Assured

42:24 What boards do not know about their own AI exposure

46:16 Two scenarios for AI in Africa over the next decade

49:18 Advice for corporate leadership, startups and the general public

55:04 Where to find Akili AI and take the free Snapshot assessment

LINKS

Akili AI website: https://akili-ai.com

Free Akili Snapshot assessment: https://assured.akili-ai.com

Simon Bransfield-Garth on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/simonbransfieldgarth

In this episode of the Pure Digital Passion Podcast, I sit down with Yannick Lefang — Founder & CEO of Kasi Insight, Africa's leading decision intelligence company — for one of the most intellectually rich conversations I've had on this podcast.

Yannick's path to founding Kasi is unlike almost any other founder story in the African technology biased ecosystem. Born in France, raised in Cameroon, trained as an electrical engineer at the University of Ottawa (cum laude), he spent over a decade in financial risk management at TD Bank in Toronto — before joining the International Finance Corporation to advise African banks on risk frameworks across East, Southern, and West Africa. That experience revealed a data gap no one had filled: Africa had no reliable, high-frequency, pan-continental consumer intelligence platform. So in 2017, he built one.

Today, Kasi Insight tracks consumer sentiment, economic signals, brand performance, and retail dynamics across 21 African markets — conducting 120,000+ interviews annually and generating 80 million data points. Their Kasi Index of Consumer Sentiment is distributed on Bloomberg and Refinitiv.

We cover his entire journey — from his grandfather's entrepreneurship lessons in Cameroon, to the Nortel collapse, the Lehman Brothers crisis at TD Bank, the Kasi founding story, and what it actually takes to build Africa's consumer data infrastructure from the ground up:

00:00 — Introduction & background: Who is Yannick Lefang?

03:33 — Growing up in Cameroon: the grandfather who shaped an entrepreneur

10:00 — From medical school expulsion in Benin to engineering in Canada

18:36 — Cultural shock: arriving in Ottawa from Cameroon in January

20:44 — The collaboration lesson that turned his academic career around

24:41 — Career journey: Nortel, E*TRADE, and moving to Toronto's financial industry

30:00 — Inside TD Bank: market risk, capital markets, and the 2008 financial crisis

33:00 — Two weeks into a new TD role — and into the middle of a Lehman Brothers write-down

35:00 — The mentor question that started everything: "If you had a magic stick..."

36:17 — The inflation basket that didn't work, and the pivot to survey data

37:33 — Why Kenya (not Cameroon): the lunch conversation that changed the company

38:51 — The founding logic: Africa was making decisions without a feedback loop

44:57 — The moat: why 9 years of primary data cannot be bought at any price

47:35 — From data company to market research company to decision intelligence company

52:23 — Building the infrastructure: 1,500+ ground-level researchers, country by country

54:33 — Why Kasi built its own platform (Tableau was $2,999 per user)

55:18 — Who the clients are: Bloomberg, Reuters, African banks, FMCGs, NGOs

56:49 — Kasi tracked COVID in Africa before the WHO declared a pandemic

1:00:14 — What separates Kasi from traditional research companies

1:03:44 — The vision: becoming the Bloomberg of Africa

1:06:50 — Advice for young Africans: work ethic, challenging the status quo, and the informal market

1:10:48 — Closing reflections

81% of African PR professionals are using AI — but are they using it right? Mary Njoki breaks it down. In this episode of the Pure Digital Passion podcast, I sit down with Mary Njoki — Founder & CEO of Glass House PR — for a wide-ranging, hour-long conversation covering her founder journey, the story behind the 2026 State of PR in Africa Report, and what the findings really mean for the industry.

Mary founded Glass House PR in 2012 at 23 years old, starting with a modem, a laptop, and a free website template. She finished high school at 16, discovered PR through volunteer work at a Nairobi youth community, and spent the first two years doing pro bono work before landing Facebook as a client in year three.

Thirteen years later, Glass House PR is one of Africa's leading Pan-African communications agencies — and a couple of weeks ago released the 2026 State of PR in Africa Report, the most comprehensive and current examination of the African PR industry to date.

We cover:

1. The real story behind the 81.5% AI adoption figure (it's about depth, not just usage)
2. The shift from SEO to GEO and why organizations with content cultures win the AI era
3. The human premium and what it takes to direct AI rather than be directed by it
4. The Gen Z opportunity, algorithm volatility and the case for owned media
5. AI governance as self-governance, and why Africa's most urgent AI challenge is training LLMs on African data.

Time Stamps

00:15 Introduction and guest welcome

02:07 Why "Glass House PR"? The meaning behind the name

02:34 From computer science dreams to PR: the unconventional path

03:30 Finishing high school at 16 and starting a company at 23

04:25 K Crew and the volunteer moment when PR clicked

05:46 Building Glass House PR with a modem and a laptop

06:39 Two years of pro bono work and the early conviction

09:40 Building a Pan-African footprint

10:00 Facebook in year three: the validation moment

12:10 Before Facebook, there was Google — and a near miss

13:54 Introducing the 2026 State of PR in Africa Report

14:29 The Turkey summit that triggered the whole initiative

16:41 The methodology: 54 agencies, 16 countries, 80 students

17:09 Why 16 countries? Mary wanted 54.

18:15 How the AI and digital-first theme emerged from last year's findings

20:34 Producing Pan-African findings across radically different markets

21:34 The most surprising finding: 81% using AI — but at a basic level

24:47 From SEO to GEO: optimising for AI citations, not search clicks

27:11 Why the future belongs to content creators, not advertisers

27:58 PR budgets rising from 2027 — because of thought leadership content

28:18 74.1% say AI enhances vs 42.5% of Gen Z say it reduces authenticity

31:31 "How do you become the human agent?" 32:00 The 10,000 hours argument: AI amplifies mastery

33:52 Gen Z: microwave generation or untapped opportunity?

34:42 "They just need direction" — Mary on developing Gen Z talent

35:48 Legacy practitioners and the fear that Gen Z is "cheating"

36:13 Finding 7: the generational platform split

36:39 Algorithm volatility, TikTok's Africa problem, and rented land

38:40 Traditional PR agencies and the digital-first reckoning

39:38 The client who still wants to see a newspaper photo

40:55 Trust metrics vs vanity metrics and the Kenyan media landscape

44:42 AI governance: self-governance before external policy

46:35 AI sameness and the value of original human creativity

48:10 "The authenticity that comes with originality can never be replaced"

49:04 Training LLMs on African data: owning the narrative at algorithm level

51:12 Global South amplifying humans vs Global North replacing them

52:40 It's not about AI leadership — it's about use case studies

53:24 Advice for young Kenyans and Africans entering PR in the AI era

54:49 AI proficiency: the new "do you have computer packages?"

56:27 The question nobody asks — and why tech and PR have always been one