jamal 
Abel Aboh
BY AYILARA SAMUEL ADELEKE
A data management and Artificial Intelligence (AI) expert, Abel Aboh has advised industry operators, institutions and government how best to innovate with artificial intelligence (AI).
Aboh, an expert with international affiliations, said the country will be better for it if it could embed AI learning in the school curricular.
Aboh, a Data Manager, AI leader, and board member at The Data Lab in Scotland, provided the insight during an interview with Channels, stating the embedding of AI learning should be tenable at different tiers beginning from the nursery level.
Aboh is a visionary British-Nigerian data and AI expert who has proven to be key in shaping decisions in the field of Artificial Intelligence and making contributions to shaping the global technological landscape.
“We need to start from the early years. When we talk about early years careers, we’re talking about people that are from nursery school. It’s crazy to say that, but countries like China are already starting from nursery and primary school,” Aboh said.
How to innovate with AI, he added, should begin with having the necessary infrastructure in place, mentioning the availability of computers, and internet access as key.
“Imagine a school without internet or without using computers.
“It’s not possible. We’ve got to embed artificial intelligence as part of the curriculum. This is not about an optional thing. This is a compulsory thing that needs to happen,” he said.
Following up on the issue of 3 million Nigerians reportedly in tech schools, he stated the country needed more given a number of factors.
“You mentioned a number about 3 million, that’s a good number. But in my projection, we need to be targeting 10 million young Nigerian youths at the moment, not just 3 million,” Aboh said.
Nigerian schools whether nursery, secondary of tertiary Aboh stated, needed to integrate artificial intelligence using reliable systems.
He called for AI integration across Nigeria’s roughly 200 universities and colleges, including secondary and primary schools.
“These institutions need to be using artificial intelligence as part of their curriculum; not just coding or data science, but how to develop and create those tools as well.”
According to him, another way how to innovate with AI is ensuring improved social well-being for the population, especially the target group for the training to avoid distraction.
“When someone is hungry, what the person needs is food. People are hungry because they’re not economically active. Artificial intelligence will help you earn money, create things you can sell, and feed yourself,” he said.
“We can’t just go into the farms and keep farming every day. It’s not possible. We’ve got to apply artificial intelligence to everything we do. We’ve got the national AI strategy, unfortunately, the strategy is under draft and that’s sitting in the shed. That’s not good enough. We need to move that from a draft to an active policy,” he said.
