The executive vice chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof. Umar Danbatta, has said the Fifth Generation Network (5G) is required to unleash the huge economic potentials of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain in every country.
He stated this when he delivered his keynote address at the virtual Digital Africa Conference and Exhibition 2021 with the theme – ‘Building a New Africa with AI and Blockchain’.
Danbatta made reference to recent statistics quoted in the ‘emergent research’, a research consulting firm forecast on small businesses which projected that the global Blockchain market of 180.7 million dollars in 2019 was anticipated to reach 1.12 billion dollars by the year 2027 and that it would be a compound growth rate of 25.6 per cent, stressing the 5G network would help the world achieve this feat.
The NCC boss urged Africa to take advantage of the unprecedented quantities of data, now being generated on sentiment, behaviour, human health, commerce, communications, migration and more.
“Adoption of AI solutions is expected to increase tremendously in the next few years and competition among major AI companies is expected to be intense,” he said.
He noted that, in a recent report published by Markets and Markets (M&M), the global AI market size was projected to grow from 58.3 billion dollars in 2021 to 309.6 billion dollars by 2026, describing it as a compound of enormous growth rate of 39.7 per cent during the forecast period.
He explained that blockchain is the foundation for crypto currency such as bitcoin which is one of the newest technologies that has received extensive global attention in recent times. “Blockchain serves as an immutable measure which allows transactions take place in addition to a live manner. Blockchain based applications are springing up, covering numerous fields including financial services, refutation systems, Internet of Things (IoT), health and so on, he added.”
