Artificial Intelligence can help Zambia leapfrog development stages —Gupta

Zambia can once again bypass conventional development stages and move directly into advanced digital transformation by embracing artificial intelligence (AI), an industry expert has said.

In response to a press query, AI strategist, Pooja Gupta, said the country had already demonstrated its ability to leapfrog outdated systems when it skipped fixed landlines and rapidly adopted mobile technology.

“Leapfrogging means skipping intermediate development steps to adopt advanced solutions directly. Zambia has done this before — we skipped landlines and went straight to mobile. We can do it again with AI,” Gupta said.

She outlined six strategic areas that could accelerate AI adoption and economic transformation, beginning with mobile-first deployment.
With mobile penetration exceeding 90 percent, Gupta said Zambia could roll out AI services directly through smartphones rather than following the traditional progression from desktops to laptops and then mobile devices.

She said AI-powered agricultural advice could be delivered via SMS and WhatsApp, healthcare expanded through mobile telemedicine, financial services strengthened through AI chatbots integrated into mobile money platforms, and education enhanced through AI tutors accessible on basic smartphones.

“Instead of building expensive computer labs in rural schools, we can deploy AI tutoring applications on smartphones. A learner in Mpika can receive the same personalised support as one in Lusaka,” she said.

Gupta also urged the country to avoid costly legacy systems by adopting cloud-native infrastructure from the outset.

Starting directly in the cloud, she said, would remove the burden of maintaining expensive on-premise infrastructure and significantly speed up the rollout of government AI services.

She further encouraged the use of open-source AI frameworks to reduce licensing costs and prevent vendor lock-in, noting that local developers could customise models to support Zambian languages such as Bemba.

She added that integrating AI with blockchain could create transparent systems such as secure, tamper-proof land registries, and stressed that multilingual AI must be prioritised to ensure services are accessible in local languages.

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