I’m still processing the events of this past week. To be honest, I’m completely delighted and humbled to have been awarded ‘Best Paper’ at the 25th PAMRO Media Research Conference here in Nairobi. It was a delightful surprise and a moment of immense pride.

This award holds a special significance for me. This was my first public engagement in over two months since injuring my legs and undergoing surgery. Navigating the world on crutches and in a wheelchair has been a new and challenging experience, and I am incredibly grateful to the PAMRO organizers. They went above and beyond to make special provisions for my limited mobility, ensuring I could deliver my presentation smoothly and comfortably. Your support made all the difference.

It was truly invigorating to be back in the mix, especially for an event of this calibre. The conference returned to Kenya for the first time in sixteen years, and the energy was palpable. Being amongst a vibrant myriad of stakeholders — from marketing, advertising, research, monitoring, and production, hailing from Kenya, across Africa, and beyond — was a powerful reminder of the brilliant minds shaping our industry.

My presentation, “AI & The African Mediascape: A Blueprint for Commercial Survival in an Age of Distrust,” was a call to action for our industry, which stands at a critical inflection point. For those who couldn’t attend, here is a brief synopsis of the key arguments I shared:

A Blueprint for Commercial Survival: A Synopsis

The core of my presentation was that the unwritten rules of digital media have been torn up. The old bargain where publishers provided content in exchange for traffic from search engines is officially broken, and we must adapt to survive.

• The Global Warning Shot & The “Crawler Checkmate”: I highlighted how global publishers are now calling out platforms like Google as “intentional bad actors.” The issue is the use of a single, unified web crawler for both traditional search (which sends traffic) and generative AI products (which “steal” content to train models). This presents publishers with an impossible choice: block the crawler and become invisible on search, or allow it and effectively train your replacement.
• The Shift to “Answer Engines” & The Commercial Impact: AI-driven search is transforming “search engines” into “answer engines,” satisfying user queries directly on the results page. This is causing a catastrophic decline in referral traffic, recentralizing value away from content creators and towards the platform owners. This isn’t a future threat; it’s a commercial reality happening now.
• The African Context & The Governance Vacuum: While AI offers incredible opportunities for efficiency and creativity, its adoption across Africa is fragmented. A recent survey shows only 9% of African media organizations use AI extensively. More alarmingly, a study in Zambia revealed that while 60% of journalists use AI tools, 85% of their newsrooms have no AI policy in place. This ad-hoc adoption has created a dangerous governance vacuum, leaving the industry vulnerable.
• The Twin Threats of “Data Colonialism” & The “Liar’s Dividend”: The risks are twofold. First, “Data Colonialism,” where global AI models trained on non-African data produce biased, stereotypical, and inaccurate results. Second, the weaponization of AI to create deepfakes and propaganda is fueling a “Liar’s Dividend” — a collapse in trust where audiences begin to disbelieve even authentic information, rendering the media environment commercially worthless for advertisers.

• A Blueprint for a High-Trust Future: I proposed a three-pillar strategy to move from a defensive posture to an offensive one:

1. Redefining Value: We must create a new, transparent economy for AI content access through emerging models like “Pay-Per-Crawl” and “Pay-Per-Query” (a royalty model).
2. A Pan-African Governance Framework: I called on PAMRO to spearhead a Pan-African Code of Conduct for the Ethical Use of AI, grounded in our own contexts and principles like Ubuntu.
3. The “PAMRO AI Trust Mark”: The capstone of the strategy is to create a certification for ethical compliance. This “Trust Mark” would turn ethics into a commercial asset, allowing certified media owners to command premium ad rates in a low-trust world.

The time for isolated experimentation is over. We must move forward with collective, strategic action to ensure that “Trust and Truth” become the verifiable and commercially valuable foundation of the African media industry for generations to come.

You can access the presentation here:

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/ai-the-african-mediascape-a-blueprint-for-commercial-survival-in-an-age-of-distrust/283267191