TOP level corporate executives need to embrace new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) to improve institutional performances in the current digital age.

Dr Jabir Bakari, the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) director general, made this appeal at a roundtable organized by the Institute of Directors Tanzania in Dar es Salaam at the weekend.

He stated that institutions should not fear AI but instead leverage its transformative potential, explaining that AI was not a new phenomenon, having evolved from developments in computing and internet systems.

“It was a theory for creating computer systems capable of performing tasks requiring human intelligence,” he said, elaborating that AI involved more advanced algorithms and logic, leading to situations where systems start behaving like human beings and even excel beyond a specific threshold.” 

This is just a more advanced form of the same set of instructions identified as software and programmes, “but we should always not forget that all these are made by human intelligence, which has to be prepared,” he further noted.

Asserting that technological developments are historically determined, he pointed at the temporal sources of the current information age, suggesting that “it will live and pass just as the Stone Age, the Iron Age and the Industrial Ages.”

He described digital transformation as cross-sectoral programmes in agriculture, transport infrastructure, mining, education and health, which need to exercise digital readiness and observe its standards.

All it takes is to plug the infrastructure and build applications, the software, the programmes which are then uploaded for use by all the sectors, he said, insisting that applying technologies in all sectors could transform economies.

He cited an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) report showing that a 10 per cent increase in the use of technology in the various sectors pushes a rise in the Gross Domestic Product GDP) by 2.5 per cent to reach clear initiative or systemic application.

He briefed the participants on TCRA’s plan to push the teaching of subjects that facilitate the digital economy, namely science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

He similarly pointed at digital clubs from kindergarten to university, cautioning that “if we don't put the right dose at that level, we cannot have a mathematician at the university level, neither at advanced level, not even at the secondary school level.”

TCRA sponsored five participants in this year’s African secondary school mathematics competition held in South Africa in August, where three of them were awarded bronze medals.

They are Ambrose Rutashobya of Iyunga Technical School, Zakaria Mwita of Azania and Stella Maliti of Marian Girls, where the latter won two medals and was declared “Queen of Mathematics,” he added.