All the opportunities I have gotten till date…was through a referral – Femi Ogunbodede.
In this episode of the Data and AI Gist Podcast, host, Philip Ade-Akanbi chats with Femi Ogunbodede; the Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Lead at Indicina.
A data scientist with over 5 years of experience, mostly in the fintech space, focusing on credit, he enjoys running (having run two marathons), listening to music, and drinking coffee.
His proudest moment in his career is taking a product idea from the product team and seeing it developed, sold to clients, and serving a lot of customers.
Femi shares insights into the following: Absence of an African ChatGPT, Lack of Research Culture, Access to Data at Scale, Dedicating Resources to AI Research, AI and Economic Inclusion, Balancing Global Practices with Nigerian Reality, Data Privacy, Fairness and Explainability, Significant AI Solutions in Africa, AI/ML Adoption in Nigeria, AI Governance.
One of the key points he highlights in this episode is how Neo-banks like FairMoney and Carbon took a data-driven approach, gathering data from the ground up for decisioning to give out loans to regular Nigerians.
He notes that AI can make things easier and faster for existing players (neo-banks and traditional banks) who have already gathered data and AI models can be fine-tuned for specific use cases.
For Femi, his biggest career mistake was thinking that “anything is possible” and falling into the trap of trying to do everything, not realizing that resources and time are limited.
The failure of a big, 6-month “moonshot” project taught him that he should have started very small with a proof of concept (PoC) to check if the idea could actually work, instead of going straight into a full development.
He advises people to identify people with similar interests, discuss projects, and keep in touch at a professional level. He also advises people to “pay it forward” and help others with referrals.
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