Kampala, Uganda — The world’s business landscape is changing, and one of the biggest changes is happening on screens rather than in shops, factories and offices. For Ugandan entrepreneur Nyanzi Martin Luther, technology has created a different way of thinking about business — one in which an idea developed in one place can potentially reach customers thousands of kilometres away.
He points to applications as an example.
“When you start an application, you must have a goal. With that goal, you must plan the audience and the content,” Nyanzi said.
The idea, he argues, is not simply to create an application because technology is fashionable. Entrepreneurs must first identify a problem, understand the people they want to serve and build around a clear objective.
Once a digital product is working, however, its potential audience can be much larger than that of a conventional physical business.
A shop must purchase stock repeatedly. A restaurant must continually buy food. A manufacturer must produce additional goods as demand increases.
Digital products have a different cost structure.
An application doesn’t have to be physically reproduced every time someone downloads or accesses it. Instead, the same underlying product can serve many users, although maintaining servers, improving the software, employing developers, addressing security concerns and supporting users all require continuing investment.
That ability to scale is central to Nyanzi’s argument.
“You invest once and you get much,” he said.
The world’s major technology companies have built their businesses around variations of this principle. Platforms can attract users from multiple countries and generate revenue through advertising, subscriptions, transactions and other services.
The business does not necessarily depend on every user paying directly.
Instead, the size of the audience can itself become an economic asset.
Africa’s digital opportunity
For African entrepreneurs, the opportunity is significant but comes with practical difficulties.
Nyanzi says developers can encounter problems when they need access to international technology services.
Building an application may require cloud services, application programming interfaces, payment systems, software licences and other tools provided by companies outside the continent.
Access to international payments can therefore add to the challenge.
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Mobile money has become an important payment method across Africa, but some global technology services require bank cards or other forms of international payment.
For a young developer trying to launch a product, such barriers can be as important as the technical ability to build the application itself.
Nyanzi believes this is why digital education needs to go beyond teaching people how to use existing platforms.
Young Africans, he argues, should learn how applications connect to other systems, how digital products are monetised and how technology businesses can operate across borders.
Then came artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence has added another layer to the transformation.
Tools such as ChatGPT and other generative AI systems can now produce text, images, computer code and other forms of content from relatively simple instructions.
What was once largely the preserve of specialised researchers and technology companies has become accessible to ordinary users.
That has opened another commercial market.
People can subscribe to AI services, purchase credits or use APIs to incorporate AI capabilities into their own applications.
For example, a developer can build an application that uses an external AI system rather than developing an entire artificial intelligence model from scratch.
The technology companies providing the underlying systems can then earn revenue from large numbers of users and developers.
For Nyanzi, this again shows how technology can turn relatively small individual transactions into a large-scale business.
Governments face a new problem
But the growth of AI has also created questions that technology companies cannot answer on their own.
Governments are considering how to address issues including privacy, copyright, misinformation, security, and the potential misuse of increasingly powerful AI systems.
Nyanzi is concerned that poorly designed regulations could discourage innovation.
He argues that governments need to protect the public while leaving room for developers and entrepreneurs to experiment with new technologies.
The debate is already taking different forms around the world, with major economies developing their own approaches to AI governance.
But regulation is only one part of the challenge.
People also need to understand the technology they are adopting.
AI can be useful, but its output still requires human judgment. It can produce convincing material that is inaccurate, incomplete or unsuitable for a particular purpose.
That makes digital literacy increasingly important as AI becomes part of everyday work.
From using technology to owning it
Nyanzi’s broader concern is about ownership.
Africa has become a major market for international technology companies, with millions of people using foreign-owned social media platforms, payment systems, messaging applications and other digital services.
He wants African entrepreneurs to think beyond being users.
The same young people consuming technology, he argues, can also learn to build it.
A developer working in Kampala does not necessarily need a large office or a physical branch in every country to reach international customers. A digital service can cross borders almost instantly.
But reaching a global audience is not automatic.
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Building a product is only the beginning. Entrepreneurs must still find users, earn their trust, generate revenue, maintain the technology and compete with established companies.
Still, Nyanzi believes the possibility represents a major change in the way young people should think about business.
“Everyone should adopt AI,” he said.
For him, the question is no longer whether technology will influence the future of business. It is whether young entrepreneurs will help build that future.
For Africa, that could mean moving beyond being a continent of technology consumers and creating more companies, platforms, and digital services of its own.
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