Ask Stanislaus Martins what Nigerian companies are getting wrong about AI and he answers the question by telling you what happens in the first ten minutes of most of his meetings.
“I ask the CEO, are you using AI? Proud yes. Every time. Then I press a little. Finance is pasting numbers into a free ChatGPT account. Research is dropping proprietary insights into Claude. HR is running employee data through DeepSeek because a friend said it was good for dashboards. The MD is on his phone using whatever app he downloaded last week.”
He calls it BROAI. Bring Your Own AI. A deliberate echo of BYOD, the Bring Your Own Device wave that had corporate IT losing sleep a decade ago. In his view, it is putting some of the country’s most valuable companies at real risk.
The warning arrives at a moment when people are paying attention. Aleph Group, the global infrastructure company behind digital advertising and fintech solutions in more than 130 high growth markets, has just promoted Martins to Managing Director, Sub Saharan Africa. He is the first Nigerian to hold the position, and his remit, previously focused on West Africa, now covers the full region.
Twenty years in the room
Martins is not a commentator. He has spent over two decades inside the rooms where these decisions actually get made.
He started at Insight Publicis and left as Head of Digital Business, with a client list that read like a who’s who of Nigerian brand building: Pepsi, Tecno, Heineken, Gulder, Star, MTN, FCMB, Coca Cola, Peak Milk, 7UP, Nestlé and more. He crossed to Jumia as VP of Performance Marketing and later VP of Advertising, helping the ecommerce platform scale its ad business during its most aggressive growth years.
Meta came next. He served as Agency Partner for the entire Sub Saharan Africa region and led the rollout of Meta’s Authorised Sales Partnership programme across the continent, the first of its kind in Africa. He joined Aleph as Regional Meta Director for SSA, rose to Managing Director for West Africa, and with this week’s appointment takes on the full Sub Saharan mandate.
Outside the corporate roles, he has trained marketing, sales and ecommerce teams for Nestlé, MTN, Jumia, Meta, Konga, ADMARP, ADVAN and several others on hands on AI adoption, digital sales, performance marketing, and business management. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (UK) and the National Institute of Marketing Nigeria, a Certified Digital Marketing Expert from the Digital Marketing Institute Ireland, and holds the AWS Certified Cloud Architect Professional certification. Academically, a Bachelor of Education from the University of Ibadan, the Senior Management Programme from Lagos Business School, and an MBA from the Quantic School of Business.
It is that combination, agency, platform, client side and trainer, that shapes how he reads this current moment.
“The chatbot is the front door. The value is behind it.”
“We keep forgetting something simple,” he says. “These models learn from what you feed them. When you pour confidential client data, financials, company secrets and people data into several different free tools you do not own and do not control, you are not using AI. You are leaking.”
He is just as frustrated that the conversation in Nigeria has shrunk down to chatbots. “AI is not the popup that says hi, how can I help you today. That is the front door. The real value is behind it.”
He likes to use a retailer in Ogun State as a thought exercise. “The chatbot version of AI is the popup. Fine. We see it every day. The real version is an integrated system that knows which products are about to go out of stock based on the weather, salary week, and last year’s pattern. Pricing that adjusts across thousands of SKUs because a competitor moved overnight. A recommendation engine that learns each customer well enough to send the right message on the right day in the right tone in the right language. Fraud detection catching a stolen card before the order ships. The warehouse rerouting itself because a delivery van broke down in Lekki traffic. A finance team closing the month in two days instead of ten because reconciliation runs itself.”
That, he insists, is proper AI deployment. Not a tool somebody downloaded on the commute home.
The questions he thinks leaders should be asking
For Martins, 2026 is not about adopting more tools. It is about asking better questions.
What tools are approved. What data are they connected to. Who is accountable when something goes wrong. What does good actually look like for this particular business. Where is the real value, and where is it just convenience. How can existing systems be made smarter rather than replaced wholesale. Does the leadership team need an AI advisor sitting alongside them.
“One integrated strategy,” he says. “Same solution. Same local data. All departments. Safe, secure, accountable. Not everyone in the company throwing company information into different models to learn from.”
It is the line he tends to repeat in workshops. “Stop celebrating that you are using AI. Start asking what it is learning from, and who owns the answer. The companies that figure this out in 2026 will pull ahead. The ones that do not will find out the hard way.”
For Nigerian boardrooms, and increasingly for policymakers thinking about the country’s digital economy posture, the advice comes from someone who has spent twenty years building the rails everyone else is running on.
Stanislaus Martins advises and trains blue chip businesses across the region on the practical application of Marketing, Technology and AI in business growth. He writes at www.martins.com.ng.
