The 8th Edition of AI Expo Africa, Africa’s largest Artificial Intelligence (AI) event will again be held in Johannesburg, South Africa 29-31 October. This year we will be joined by the UN ITU AI4Good Impact Africa Summit for a 3 day show bringing a focus to the growing use of AI for impact / SDGs and research to solve some of mankind’s largest challenges. As the largest gathering of Artificial Intelligence buyers and practitioners in Africa, we reflect on some of the key Artificial Intelligence Trends we think will be top of mind for CxOs, buyers, vendors & entrepreneurs in 2025.

1. Proliferation of Autonomous Agents & Agentic AI

In line with what we saw in 2024 with launches by the likes of Salesforce, 2025 is likley to be the year of Agentic AI and AI Agents. Autonomous AI agents will become more prevalent but to what extent this would be allowed in regulated environments is still questionable. Trends we are likely to see will focus on Agents operating together or independently, making decisions, and taking actions without human intervention. Agentic AI will advance, enabling AI systems to reason, learn, and adapt in complex environments, making them more effective in achieving their goals. A big step closer to the Autonomous Enterprise, yes – but will this happen to any great extent by big corporates? Lets wait and see.

2. Increased Use of Cognitive Architectures & Hybrid Intelligence

Cognitive architectures will be used more extensively, providing a framework for integrating multiple AI systems, enabling more sophisticated reasoning, and decision-making. Hybrid intelligence will emerge, combining the strengths of humans and AI agents, enabling more effective collaboration, and decision-making. This is not new BUT its clear that the acceptance that humans (real workers) will leverage AI to assist them in complex tasks er. coding, testing, content creation, animation and media generation is going mainstream.

3. Rise of Explainable AI (XAI) & Growing focus on Responsible AI

XAI will gain traction, enabling businesses to understand and interpret AI-driven decisions, increasing transparency, and building trust in AI systems. Responsible AI, standards, privacy and ethics will become a key driver with organizations prioritizing responsible AI development, deployment, and use, ensuring fairness, accountability, and transparency, while considering privacy and security concerns. AI agent safety and security will become a major concern, with researchers and developers focusing on ensuring that AI agents operate safely and securely.

4. Quantum AI and Hybrid Approaches

With the recent news on Microsoft’s Quantum project Majorana, its clear that Quantum AI and hybrid approaches will emerge, enabling researchers to explore new AI paradigms, combining classical and quantum computing, and pushing the boundaries of AI research and development. Where this will take us is broadly up for debate, but what is true is that Quantum AI could solve problems considered impossible today. These include optimization problems, which are crucial in logistics, finance, materials science, and other areas. Simulating complex systems, such as chemical reactions or protein structures.

5. Increased Adoption of Edge AI

With the phones in our pockets becoming ever smarter, Edge AI will become more prevalent. Edge AI is the integration of AI algorithms directly on devices such as sensors, cameras, smartphones, or industrial equipment, enabling AI processing to occur at the edge of the network, reducing latency, and improving real-time decision-making. The likes of Nvidia, AMD and Arm are pioneering in this space.

6. Language Localization in Emerging Markets

Development of Localized AI Solutions in emerging markets such as Africa where new models are being develop to work with and offer services in low resource languages. Africa has 2000 languages and yet many of them have no AI language model to support them. There’s a growing recognition of the need for localized AI solutions that address Africa’s unique challenges such the the Mashakane Project – whose mission is to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.

7. AI Compute & AI Inference as a Service

Outside the hyperscaler service provider domain, in 2024 we started to see vendor neutral AI Compute as a Service emerge and this is will go mainstream in 2025. Advances in hardware and software are enabling faster inference speeds, which is critical for applications that require real-time processing, such as self-driving cars or smart home devices. AI models are becoming smaller, more affordable and more accessible to organizations with limited resources. This trend is driving adoption in industries like healthcare, education, and finance meaning the demand for specialized AI Compute & AI Inference will drive this segment.

8. VC funding will follow AI

In 2024, AI startups garnered 46% of the total $209 billion raised globally, a stark contrast to the less than 1% directed toward all African tech investment initiatives and even less towards AI. This underrepresentation is not reflective of the continent’s vibrant AI ecosystem, characterized by a growing number of startups, innovation hubs, and increasing global interest. Launched in 2016 Instadeep BioNTech acquired InstaDeep for nearly $700M, the largest-ever acquisition for an African deep-tech company, proving that AI was not just the domain of Silicon Valley. The telling point of this exit is that Instadeep focused on solving “hard problems” using deep learning.

9. Multi-Modal AI

AI is becoming increasingly adept at handling multiple forms of data, such as text, images, and audio. This enables more sophisticated applications, like chatbots that can understand voice commands and respond accordingly. Just like the Chat Bot on this website provided to us by Stubber – you can write text but also leave a voice note. The back end of the Bot also holds all the context of the site and can add context to its responses making them more intelligent and focused for the user. It acts as a sales agent and can pass off enquiries based on prompts and back end design features.

10. Rise and Rise of Open Source AI

Open source AI software is becoming increasingly popular, allowing developers to collaborate and build upon existing projects. This trend is driving innovation and making AI more accessible to organizations of all sizes. DeepSeek open-sourced its models. The reasons vary from altruistic or to get a foothold in a new market but its also possibly a cultural one. Will this drive the price to zero for the large incumbents like Open AI? Who knows – but we are likely to see more of this in the next 12-24 months – smashing previous norms and potentially lowering the costs globally. It has some of the look and feel of the browser wars as vendors compete in a truly global market making their base products and services free with monetization via value-add high end services and Ads.

About the AI Media Group

The AI Media Group is a South African based industry analysis, publishing & advisory consultancy focused on the AI and smart tech sector in Africa.  The group runs the South African AI Association and are the organisers of AI Expo Africa, the continent’s largest Enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) trade show.  They also publish The State of AI in Africa Report and Synapse Magazine, Africa’s only AI trade magazine charting Africa’s 4.0 innovation journey. The group also runs AI TV which hosts discussions on trends in AI / deep tech technologies with local, regional and global thought leaders.

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