From Cloud to Community: Fastagger’s On-Device AI Is Transforming Small Businesses Across Africa
Africa has the opportunity to reshape its economic future by becoming an active participant in the global digital economy. Technology is the key to unlocking this digital future. However, African countries lag behind G20 nations in their digital infrastructure and risk falling behind in their economic development.
In the age of AI, this lack of infrastructure is a barrier to unlocking productive potential and improved competitiveness. Many on the continent grapple with unreliable internet, expensive data, and the widespread use of 2G and 3 G mobile devices. Traditional AI platforms, built on cloud infrastructure and using high-spec hardware, are often incompatible with the realities on the ground, excluding Africans from the benefits of AI innovation.
What if you didn’t need a stable internet connection?
Mobile technology has dramatically increased access to digital services throughout Africa. The GSMA Mobile Economy sub-Saharan Africa 2024 report found that mobile subscriber penetration is forecast to reach 53% of the population by 2030, with 1.4 billion mobile connections. Despite this enormous growth, affordability remains a barrier: a 4G handset in Africa can cost 63% of the average monthly income, making smartphones inaccessible for many.
African deep tech startup Fastagger has developed a solution for these roadblocks by enabling AI models to run efficiently on low-power devices – including affordable smartphones. The company is building the software infrastructure needed to bring machine learning and artificial intelligence directly to the edge, where it is needed most.
Fastagger decentralises AI access by enabling AI to run on-device without needing constant connection or high-performance infrastructure, making it possible to reach rural, peri-urban, and bandwidth-constrained environments. To this end, the company is helping AI developers, startups, governments, non-profit organisations, and enterprise IT teams build applications using AI tools that don’t rely on centralised cloud infrastructure. As a result, these applications will function reliably on the ground in environments across Africa.
This means that doctors and nurses in rural and remote clinics can use on-device diagnostics and monitoring tools, teachers and children can access AI-enhanced learning tools that work offline in low-resource schools, energy and utilities workers can do predictive maintenance, and smallholder farmers can access smart agriculture advisory tools offline.
Providing a solution to strengthen Africa’s small business economy
The backbone of Africa’s economy is small and medium businesses (SMBs), many of whom rely on mobile money, a $1,7 trillion market. In 2024, Africa accounted for 53% of the global mobile money market, with 1.1 billion registered accounts out of a global total of 2 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa alone contributed $190 billion to regional GDP, highlighting mobile money’s growing economic impact.
Mobile money is not just convenient for customers – it promotes financial inclusion and drives economic activity at every level. Many SMBs rely on mobile money flows from their customers, and want to strengthen and develop those consumer relationships, yet they struggle to keep up with manual accounting processes such as paper-based documentation or Excel spreadsheets, which make it difficult to effectively manage customer retention and build brand loyalty.
According to Bain & Company, for small businesses, just a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profitability by 25 to 95 percent. For SMBs, this could be the difference between success and failure. The market for innovation is significant – in 2024, one in 10 mobile money users was based in Kenya, with an estimated 100 million SMBs in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Fastagger has built an AI business assistant agent using mobile-based AI. For a small fee of just $1 to $5 a month, SMBs can access a SaaS (Software as a Service) tool, using mobile-based AI to provide these small businesses with customer intelligence, automate engagement, and provide business coaching to build skills.
Compared to a manual process of up to eight steps to reconcile payments and engage with customers, the Fastagger process allows merchants to set parameters for customer rew