A Lagos Makeup Artist Outsilicons Enterprise AI. She Used ChatGPT for Empathy. The Tool Followed Her, Obviously.
Rest of World reports that workers across Asia and Africa are adopting AI for practical business tasks rather than chasing Silicon Valley narratives. Ogunmuyiwa, a Lagos-based makeup artist, first used ChatGPT as a customer support officer to rewrite emails with more empathy and professionalism. When she left her logistics job in 2024 to run her makeup business full time, she brought AI tools with her rather than abandoning them. The pattern across the reporting is workers investing time, not capital, into AI integration.
This demonstrates what I call utility-driven diffusion. Adoption spreads fastest where the problem is most concrete and the barrier to entry is lowest. These workers are not waiting for enterprise IT departments or venture funding. They are treating AI as a general-purpose tool and applying it to whatever friction exists in their daily workflow. The mental model: find the most annoying repetitive task, apply AI, move on.
Ogunmuyiwa in Lagos, a Taiwanese personal trainer, and workers across Asia and Africa profiled by Rest of World. The common thread is independent business operators using ChatGPT to solve specific local problems without institutional support.
- Identify one communication task you do repeatedly that feels mechanical. Customer emails, social media captions, client follow-ups. Write down the task and why it annoys you.
- Open ChatGPT and give it your exact context: 'I run a [business type] and I need to write a [message type] to a [recipient] about [topic]. Make it sound [tone].' Paste the output into your actual workflow.
- Refine the prompt based on what felt wrong in the first output. Save the working prompt in a notes app. Reuse it every time that task comes up. The goal is a reusable template, not a one-off experiment.