Opinions about AI rightly stay divided. Builders and innovators within the sector who’ve championed the expertise’s progress, see it as the longer term—the way forward for work, and the way forward for saying no to the mundane, repetitive duties. Customers, however, are cut up into pro-AI adopters, and those that worry how deeply the bleeding-edge expertise will affect jobs.
But, this hasn’t stopped AI’s fast development—which has been something however unintended futurism.
In Africa, this innovation wave is shortly gaining floor, due to ChatGPT and open-source giant language fashions (LLMs), which have sparked startup concepts that sit on the borderline of displacing jobs whereas additionally eradicating mundane duties for companies.
The rise of AI-powered “Swiss Military” instruments
In Nigeria, just a few of those startups have popped up just lately: Vzy, a Nigerian AI-powered web site builder, launched in 2023, permits anyone to immediate their solution to constructing a brand new web site; a0dev, one other Nigerian startup which joined Y Combinator in 2025, permits you to create a React cell app from scratch utilizing prompts; and now, Egypt’s Stakpak, by using AI brokers, helps software program and DevOps engineers arrange production-ready infrastructure a lot sooner.
“No less than 45% of builders use six core instruments to ship their merchandise, however configuring them is advanced,” George Fahmy, Stakpak CEO advised TechCabal. “Every instrument speaks its personal language, requiring groups to sew them collectively by going by a whole bunch of documentation pages simply to ship a product to clients. Solely about 3% of builders have the abilities to handle this full-time.”
Globally, there’s a scarcity of DevOps engineers, making the few present professionals high-maintenance. Based on wage aggregator, Payscale, the typical Nigerian engineer earns ₦250,000 ($163) month-to-month. This overhead value is along with the software program engineering groups that firms have to rent.
In an infrastructure-heavy funds firm like eTranzact, entry-level DevOps engineers earn between ₦250,000–₦400,000 ($163–$260) month-to-month, whereas mid-level professionals earn over ₦600,000 ($390), relying on efficiency and negotiation.
Some firms decide to rent the companies of cloud engineering consulting companies to offset the bills of paying full-time salaries. But, in keeping with Clutch, these companies cost between $10,000–$50,000 on a challenge foundation.
With the fast-rise of platforms like Stakpak, a0dev, and Vzy, founders may develop into the startup equal of a Swiss Military knife, transport merchandise sooner, hiring fewer skills and saving cash on employees overhead prices, thus extending runway. AI growth instruments are making it simpler to show startup concepts into actual merchandise, however the trade-off is that skills might wrestle to maintain up—forcing them to evolve or pivot.
Constructing upside, scaling draw back
Because of the excessive value of retaining DevOps expertise, some startups prepare their software program engineers to tackle a hybrid function. Within the brief time period, this could work, particularly as startups ship fewer options and sometimes use serverless expertise, decreasing the necessity for hands-on infrastructure administration.
But, as workloads improve, engineers will want extra management over infrastructure. For instance, transitioning from serverless to managed Kubernetes or different scalable architectures requires sturdy DevOps expertise. In the event that they make it previous that hurdle, rising infrastructure demand can disrupt the workflow of engineers who’re splitting time between growth and DevOps, slowing down product iteration and growing time-to-market.
To ease this burden, some startups are turning to AI-powered DevOps instruments. These instruments assist automate infrastructure setup and administration, decreasing the necessity for devoted DevOps engineers within the early phases.
For instance, Stakpak has gotten early traction from early-stage startups in Egypt, corresponding to Credify, Paymob, and Zammit. Its AI agentic growth instrument prices solely $50 month-to-month.
Stakpak’s clear profit is being a sidekick to early-stage engineering groups, nonetheless, its use case for big enterprises continues to be unsure. Stakpak’s AI is used for important DevOps work, thus making certain reliability is essential—errors in infrastructure setup may result in safety dangers, downtime, or excessive cloud prices.
“It’d take an extended time for greater firms to undertake brokers in deployment,” stated Aaron Adetunmbi, a Nigerian software program developer. “They usually have sophisticated processes for this, and because the expertise is new, there’s nowhere for them to be taught. LLMs can ‘hallucinate’ and this could result in pricey errors.”
Fahmy claims that Stakpak was constructed utilizing a mixture of closed-source and open-source LLMs, however the startup units its personal analysis benchmarks for its information units, ensuring its AI brokers are dependable. Working guide analysis checks value about $400 per experiment, in keeping with Fahmy, making AI-powered platforms costly to construct.
However he admits that it has been troublesome promoting to giant enterprises, so the startup is concentrated on early-stage startups, with a possible to onboard greater purchasers sooner or later. Launched in 2024, Stakpak has already began producing income, stated Fahmy.
“Our instrument is niched, so we’re nonetheless validating who our greatest purchasers are,” stated Fahmy. “We’ve not hit product-market match, however we’re iterating our product and producing income from clients who’ve been paying us for over a yr and a half since we launched our earliest model.”
Presently, Fahmy, who splits his time between Cairo and San Francisco, sees a market within the US as a consequence of its developed startup ecosystem. He says that adoption of agentic deployment instruments like Stakpak might take some time in Africa.
Are jobs heading down the drain?
A 2024 Stack Overflow report, primarily based on a survey of over 30,000 software program builders, discovered that almost all of them anticipate AI instruments to affect their workflows in 2025. About 79% consider AI will play a serious function in how they doc, write, check, and deploy code.
In the meantime, the time period “vibe coding” has gained traction, referring to entrepreneurs quickly constructing and deploying software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps utilizing prompts. This pattern is spreading past software program growth to areas like advertising, DevOps, design, and animation, exhibiting AI’s rising versatility.
Past their utility, there’s investor confidence round these startups. Stakpak raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding from P1 ventures, with participation from traders Digital Foreign money Group, 500 Sanabil, and angel traders.
a0dev, based by Seth Setse and Ayomide Omolewa, raised an undisclosed quantity from a gaggle of YC alumni beneath Pioneer Fund. Bootstrapped Vzy, based by Evans Akanno, has not raised any VC {dollars}, but it surely has acquired over $50,000 in funding from buddies in addition to startup accelerators.
Throughout Africa, extra founders are constructing AI agentic instruments to resolve industry-specific issues in logistics, finance, and customer support in ways in which have an effect on much more skills.
Regardless of the scare round AI brokers displacing jobs, these agentic growth instruments are usually not intuitive. Entrepreneurs or customers with zero coding expertise will wrestle to make use of these instruments, making expert builders nonetheless a precedence. However there’s a studying curve for conventional engineers. They need to upskill and develop into snug with utilizing AI brokers of their growth and deployment processes.
“AI brokers are the most recent game-changer in tech, and 2025 is proving to be their breakout yr,” stated Akinkunmi Tokede, a DevOps engineer. “AI-powered assistants will make life simpler for us in tech. There’s been numerous speak about AI changing engineers, however I don’t see that occuring, at the very least not for expert professionals. AI brokers are right here to help, not exchange; they save time for engineers and companies, not value.”
As AI continues to weave itself into the material of software program growth, the {industry} stands at a crossroads—one the place automation meets adaptation. The rise of AI brokers is exhibiting a shift occurring, not simply in how software program is constructed however in who builds it and the way they work. Whereas fears of job displacement persist, the truth is extra nuanced: AI isn’t eliminating builders; it’s redefining their roles. For these prepared to embrace this alteration, the longer term isn’t about being changed—it’s about staying forward.
