Opinions about AI rightly remain divided. Builders and innovators in the sector who have championed the technology’s growth, see it as the future—the future of work, and the future of saying no to the mundane, repetitive tasks. Users, on the other hand, are split into pro-AI adopters, and those who fear how deeply the bleeding-edge technology will impact jobs.
Yet, this hasn’t stopped AI’s rapid advancement—which has been anything but accidental futurism.
In Africa, this innovation wave is quickly gaining ground, thanks to ChatGPT and open-source large language models (LLMs), which have sparked startup ideas that sit on the borderline of displacing jobs while also removing mundane tasks for businesses.
The rise of AI-powered “Swiss Army” tools
In Nigeria, a few of these startups have popped up recently: Vzy, a Nigerian AI-powered website builder, launched in 2023, allows anybody to prompt their way to building a new website; a0dev, another Nigerian startup which joined Y Combinator in 2025, allows you to create a React mobile app from scratch using prompts; and now, Egypt’s Stakpak, through the use of AI agents, helps software and DevOps engineers set up production-ready infrastructure much faster.
“At least 45% of developers use six core tools to ship their products, but configuring them is complex,” George Fahmy, Stakpak CEO told TechCabal. “Each tool speaks its own language, requiring teams to stitch them together by going through hundreds of documentation pages just to ship a product to customers. Only about 3% of developers have the skills to manage this full-time.”
Globally, there is a shortage of DevOps engineers, making the few existing professionals high-maintenance. According to salary aggregator, Payscale, the average Nigerian engineer earns ₦250,000 ($163) monthly. This overhead cost is in addition to the software engineering teams that companies have to hire.
In an infrastructure-heavy payments company like eTranzact, entry-level DevOps engineers earn between ₦250,000–₦400,000 ($163–$260) monthly, while mid-level professionals earn over ₦600,000 ($390), depending on performance and negotiation.
Some companies opt to hire the services of cloud engineering consulting firms to offset the expenses of paying full-time salaries. Yet, according to Clutch, these firms charge between $10,000–$50,000 on a project basis.
With the fast-rise of platforms like Stakpak, a0dev, and Vzy, founders could become the startup equivalent of a Swiss Army knife, shipping products faster, hiring fewer talents and saving money on staff overhead costs, thus extending runway. AI development tools are making it easier to turn startup ideas into real products, but the trade-off is that talents may struggle to keep up—forcing them to evolve or pivot.
Building upside, scaling downside
Due to the high cost of retaining DevOps talent, some startups train their software engineers to take on a hybrid role. In the short term, this can work, especially as startups ship fewer features and often use serverless technology, reducing the need for hands-on infrastructure management.
Yet, as workloads increase, engineers will need more control over infrastructure. For example, transitioning from serverless to managed Kubernetes or other scalable architectures requires strong DevOps skills. If they make it past that hurdle, growing infrastructure demand can disrupt the workflow of engineers who are splitting time between development and DevOps, slowing down product iteration and increasing time-to-market.
To ease this burden, some startups are turning to AI-powered DevOps tools. These tools help automate infrastructure setup and management, reducing the need for dedicated DevOps engineers in the early stages.
For example, Stakpak has gotten early traction from early-stage startups in Egypt, such as Credify, Paymob, and Zammit. Its AI agentic development tool costs only $50 monthly.
Stakpak’s clear benefit is being a sidekick to early-stage engineering teams, however, its use case for large enterprises is still in doubt. Stakpak’s AI is used for critical DevOps work, thus ensuring reliability is crucial—mistakes in infrastructure setup could lead to security risks, downtime, or high cloud costs.
“It might take a longer time for bigger companies to adopt agents in deployment,” said Aaron Adetunmbi, a Nigerian software developer. “They often have complicated processes for this, and as the technology is new, there is nowhere for them to learn. LLMs can ‘hallucinate’ and this can lead to costly mistakes.”
Fahmy claims that Stakpak was built using a mix of closed-source and open-source LLMs, but the startup sets its own evaluation benchmarks for its data sets, making sure its AI agents are reliable. Running manual evaluation checks cost about $400 per experiment, according to Fahmy, making AI-powered platforms expensive to build.
But he admits that it has been difficult selling to large enterprises, so the startup is focused on early-stage startups, with a potential to onboard bigger clients in the future. Launched in 2024, Stakpak has already started generating revenue, said Fahmy.
“Our tool is niched, so we’re still validating who our best clients are,” said Fahmy. “We’ve not hit product-market fit, but we’re iterating our product and generating revenue from customers who have been paying us for over a year and a half since we released our earliest version. The next milestone for us is to hit $100,000 in annual recurring revenue with Stakpak.”
Presently, Fahmy, who splits his time between Cairo and San Francisco, sees a market in the US due to its developed startup ecosystem. He says that adoption of agentic deployment tools like Stakpak may take a while in Africa.
Are jobs heading down the drain?
A 2024 Stack Overflow report, based on a survey of over 30,000 software developers, found that most of them expect AI tools to impact their workflows in 2025. About 79% believe AI will play a major role in how they document, write, test, and deploy code.
Meanwhile, the term “vibe coding” has gained traction, referring to entrepreneurs rapidly building and deploying software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps using prompts. This trend is spreading beyond software development to areas like marketing, DevOps, design, and animation, showing AI’s growing versatility.
Beyond their utility, there’s investor confidence around these startups. Stakpak raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding from P1 ventures, with participation from investors Digital Currency Group, 500 Sanabil, and angel investors.
a0dev, founded by Seth Setse and Ayomide Omolewa, raised an undisclosed amount from a group of YC alumni under Pioneer Fund. Bootstrapped Vzy, founded by Evans Akanno, has not raised any VC dollars, but it has received over $50,000 in funding from friends as well as startup accelerators.
Across Africa, more founders are building AI agentic tools to solve industry-specific problems in logistics, finance, and customer service in ways that affect even more talents.
Despite the scare around AI agents displacing jobs, these agentic development tools are not intuitive. Entrepreneurs or users with zero coding experience will struggle to use these tools, making skilled developers still a priority. But there is a learning curve for traditional engineers. They must upskill and become comfortable with using AI agents in their development and deployment processes.
“AI agents are the latest game-changer in tech, and 2025 is proving to be their breakout year,” said Akinkunmi Tokede, a DevOps engineer. “AI-powered assistants will make life easier for us in tech. There’s been a lot of talk about AI replacing engineers, but I don’t see that happening, at least not for skilled professionals. AI agents are here to assist, not replace; they save time for engineers and businesses, not cost.”
As AI continues to weave itself into the fabric of software development, the industry stands at a crossroads—one where automation meets adaptation. The rise of AI agents is showing a shift happening, not just in how software is built but in who builds it and how they work. While fears of job displacement persist, the reality is more nuanced: AI isn’t eliminating developers; it’s redefining their roles. For those willing to embrace this change, the future isn’t about being replaced—it’s about staying ahead.
