Pan-African technology firm inq. announces new CEO and AI products

inq. has announced a new group CEO as well as numerous AI products which will officially be unveiled in an event to be held in Lusaka, Zambia, on August 30.

Pan-African edge technology provider inq. has announced a new group CEO in Glad Dibetso who succeeds former CEO Nick Reed. Prior to this development, Dibetso was the CEO of Cloud Exchange and later joined the company’s advisory board. He was also the West Africa CEO of Dimension Data.

Speaking on the appointment at a media briefing this morning, CEO of inq., Andile Ngcaba, stated that Dibetso brings much experience in heralding technology companies on the continent.

“We’re very happy to get a person as experienced as Glad to lead this company. The reason why we requested him to join this company is because of his deep experience in cloud digital transformation in the African continent. We are blessed to get a calibre like him to lead us as we embark in digital transformation through our new products,” he said.

For his part, Dibetso stated that the reason for his joining is to lead the company’s mandate to make an impact in the continent’s digital transformation ambitions.

“My mission is to make sure that inq. is an impact driven company. So impact will be at the core of everything that we do and making sure that the countries and the communities that we operate in are in a different and more advanced place after we’ve long left. So this is what my legacy would be at Inc,” he said. “Digital Transformation is my speciality and we believe that the continent is ready for digital transformation. We do not want to be left out in this race because we feel the next level of jobs for our youth will come from the digital platforms across the continent.”

New products

inq. also introduced a slew of new AI products, to be officially launched at an event in Lusaka, Zambia, on August 30, as well as numerous “centres of excellence” to be built across the company’s numerous markets.

The first of the products is DocAI, a platform which will allow businesses to digitise their manual processes. Users can use inq.’s area-specific deep learning optical character recognition (OCR) to upload scanned documents or images of any type and extract the required fields and map them into an Excel file or database.

Second is VideoAI which will allow enterprises to use artificial intelligence to get detailed analytics to deploy, manage, and monitor alerts across multiple regions. Inq. claims that this will provide quick, actionable intelligence for existing surveillance camera systems. Lastly, the company will also launch Wi-Fi 6 in its various markets.

Additionally, inq. also announced that it will be launching centres of excellence across its pan-African markets to supplement its own in-house innovation as well as talent. Zambia will host the AI centre of excellence, Malawi the cybersecurity centre of excellence, while Botswana will host the innovation centre of excellence.

“We believe that Africa should develop its own talent pipeline in the form of men and women who will participate in building solutions for Africa, to solve agriculture projects, to solve food security issues, to solve urbanisation issues, to solve health issues, to solve security issues using artificial intelligence. We hope that the centres of excellence will contribute towards creating this type of talent,” added Ngcaba.

inq. currently has direct operations in nine African countries, with an additional non-direct presence in 16 more countries.