Where To Focus on AI Journey for Most Companies [video] – Ndubuisi Ekekwe

Where should your company focus on the AI journey? I explain in this video. There are three core levels in this fledgling AI era: foundation model (FM), large language models (LLMs) and the generative AI (GenAI) levels. The FM and LLMs are to the world what Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructures are to cloud-anchored companies. In other words, we expect companies like OpenAI, Google Gemini and DeepSeek to become the infrastructure upon which the AI applications would be built when it comes to models.

This means that just as in the world of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, where we also have Flutterwave, Affirm, and Tekedia, there is a huge opportunity to build the apps of the AI era. Those apps of the AI era is what Tekedia Capital is focusing on in Africa since only few will win the FM and LLMs levels at scale, but every aspect of our existence will be transformed by GenAIs.

The opportunities at the GenAI level are largely limitless as differentiations can be created around language, geography, industry, etc. You have the firmware, the operating system and the apps in the Windows age. In this AI age, you will have FM, LLMs and the GenAI. More opportunities remain for most at the GenAI level.

At the FM and LLMs levels, companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek will have to deal with performance improvements across many domains. And the winner at the FM level may not be more than a dozen companies globally. At the LLM level, you will have sector domain winners but those winners will also do well at the GenAL level. So, largely, from banking to healthcare services, some will be at the LLM level while a majority of companies will find opportunities at the GenAI level. 

Of course, like the oil & gas industry, the FM are the upstream operations while the GenAI is your downstream. More players will be at the downstream and the value derivable very limited, but that does not mean you cannot capture value therein as there are many great oil trading and trading companies even as we have the upstream players like Shell and ExxonMobil.

In this video, I explain more while explaining positioning with a smiling curve.

In summary, do not be too fixated on those FMs but explore how the GenAIs can drive product differentiation and innovation in your company. 

Yes, besides spending time on FMs like DeepSeek and OpenAI, think about GenAIs and opportunities in your market. Most FMs will go bankrupt since only a few will thrive. But we have GenAIs to help us improve our businesses.

Focus more on what you can do with generative AI in your business instead of spending days discussing the battle among OpenAI, DeepSeek, etc foundation models. Most of those things will not matter because the Western World has accepted that in the cloud infrastructure, we can live with Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. So, when everything is done, we will wait for them at the GenAI level

A “foundation model” is a broad category of large-scale AI models capable of handling various data types like text, images, and audio, while a “Large Language Model (LLM)” is a specific type of foundation model focused solely on processing and generating human language, making it better suited for tasks like text generation and translation, whereas a foundation model can be adapted to a wider range of applications across different data modalitie

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