Technology
HP Extends Digital Partner Programme to Global Retailers
By Adedapo Adesanya
HP Incorporated has announced the extension of HP Amplify, a first-of-its-kind global channel programme, to its vast ecosystem of more than 1,350 retail partners.
Launched in the fall of 2020 to commercial partners, the new partner programme, built on a single, integrated structure provides the insights, capabilities and collaboration tools needed to drive digital transformation and growth as consumer buying behaviours continue to evolve.
HP will begin to transition retail partners to the HP Amplify program beginning August 2, 2021, and continue through the calendar year.
Built on a simplified and easy-to-navigate structure with two distinct retail tracks (Synergy and Power including Power CDR Retail targeted at retail sub-distributors), HP Amplify is designed from the ground up to turn data analytics into insights that spark new strategies, steer innovation and reward partners for performance, collaboration and capabilities while accelerating digital transformation with insights, building a data-driven culture and augmenting common knowledge with collaboration tools.
Speaking on this, Mr Christoph Schell, Chief Commercial Officer, HP Incorporated said, “For the IT industry overall, and the retail channel specifically, it is clear that business as usual is no longer an option. HP Amplify not only makes it easier for retail partners to do business with HP, but it also provides a clear path, built on a proven framework, to transform their business for today while enabling long-term sustained growth in the future.
“Together with our partner community, we are reinventing how consumers experience our products and services, by investing in our shared capabilities while developing new areas of strength to remain competitive.”
Spurred by rising demand for work, learn and entertain at home products accelerated by the pandemic, the retail industry has experienced an accelerated pace of change.
Capitalizing on the momentum of transformational experiences will be critical to building and maintaining the flexibility that is demanded of doing business today. For the foreseeable future, changes in consumer behaviour will have a greater impact on value in retail than any other single factor.
While in-store traffic decreased, e-commerce sales grew by more than 27 per cent in 2020 and is expected to account for 40 per cent of total sales for consumer-packaged goods by 2025. Trends such as hybrid work, the emergence of the prosumer and continued e-commerce growth are making collaborative partnerships in the retail industry more essential than ever.
With the introduction of HP Amplify, HP is empowering retailers to capitalize on these shifts, arming partners to deliver superior customer experiences and drive future growth.
“Customers are requesting a closer and more personalized relationship with brands,” said Mr Quentin Duminy, Global Buyer at Group Auchan, a leading retailer based in France.
“We will increase our common knowledge of the consumption patterns using data analytics in order to redesign the customer journey, improving experiences online and in-store through HP’s Amplify for Retail program,” he added.
HP Amplify offers a common platform designed to enable progressive go-to-market strategies focused on three core pillars: performance, capabilities, and collaboration.
Building on the success of the HP Amplify framework while addressing the unique needs of retailers, the new program rewards partners for a variety of performance indicators tied to portfolio sell-through and revenue. A structured compensation framework, sales boosters, and other tools help retail partners to assess performance and actions providing clear indicators of success.
Beyond sales revenue alone, HP Amplify measures reward based on new capabilities such as driving data insights, service models, consistent online and in-store experiences.
Strengthening and developing of new capabilities are supported by online digital assessments and recommendations based on core capabilities, consumer trends, benchmarking, and best practices. HP Amplify rewards partners who invest in the capabilities to compete – and win – in a world dominated by e-commerce and digital-led customer journeys.
Transformational change requires collaborative partnerships. Companies that regularly collaborate with suppliers can demonstrate higher growth, lower operating costs, and greater profitability than their industry peers.
Partners that report data will be able to anticipate and enable more positive customer outcomes, ultimately driving sales conversions and maximizing average baskets. HP will collaborate closely with partners to optimize sales through store-level assortment tools and cross-category recommendations to unlock opportunity diversification.
The HP Amplify partner program also provides partners with an optional path to a more sustainable future. Launched earlier this year to commercial partners, HP Amplify Impact is an industry-first partner assessment, resource and training program aimed at driving meaningful change across HP’s three Sustainable Impact pillars – Planet, with an emphasis on climate action; People with an emphasis on human rights and social justice; and Community with an emphasis on digital equity.
The HP Amplify Impact program helps to empower partners to set bold, long-term objectives to drive positive impact. Partners that pledge to join the HP Amplify Impact program will work with HP to assess their own practices while tapping into the company’s extensive investments and initiatives.
Recognized as one of the world’s most sustainable companies, HP has enrolled more than 1,000 partners worldwide in the HP Amplify Impact program, representing a major step forward in the company’s ambitious goal to become the most sustainable and just technology company by 2030.
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
The reach of the Meta Business Agent is being expanded to Instagram and other platforms of the social media giant.
Meta Business Agent is an artificial intelligence (AI) that allows business owners to attend to customers’ needs with ease.
Customers expect instant responses, but no team can be everywhere at once. This innovation handles such without hassles.
It helps businesses to answer questions specific to the business, makes product recommendations from the catalogue, books appointments, qualifies incoming leads, and closes sales.
More than one million businesses are already using a Meta Business Agent on WhatsApp and Messenger to respond to customers around the clock.
“We’re now expanding our Business Agent to businesses big and small globally, so within minutes you can have yours up and running, responding in your customer’s local language using your tone,” Meta said in a statement.
“We’re also expanding these agents to Instagram since businesses connect with their customers there, too. Businesses can activate their Business Agent here. Getting started with the Business Agent is free. In the coming months, businesses will access the agent through our paid subscription offerings, with options for businesses of every size,” it added.
Meta also stated that it is making it simpler for people to discover businesses powered by a Meta Business Agent directly on WhatsApp. It noted that starting soon, people will be able to find businesses by typing their name in the Search bar, or by sharing their phone number or contact card in chats with friends and family. This way, when more customers reach out, they get a quick, helpful response.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Lagos State government plans to expand the city’s data centre capacity to over 250 megawatts (MW) by 2030 as part of efforts to strengthen its digital infrastructure ecosystem.
This was disclosed by the state’s Commissioner for Innovation, Science, and Technology, Mr Olatubosun Alake, at the launch of the Kasi Cloud LOS1 data centre facility in Lekki. Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) invested in Kasi Cloud through an $8 million convertible loan note in 2021.
Mr Alake said Lagos already hosts nearly three-quarters of Nigeria’s commercial data centre capacity, adding that the government intends to expand its infrastructure footprint significantly over the next five years.
“There are about 146 additional megawatt data centres planned in the pipeline,” he said. “We envisage that by 2030, we would have over 250 megawatts of data centre capacity in Lagos, three times the current capacity growth.”
The expansion comes as demand for cloud services, AI computing power, and local data storage continues to grow across Nigeria’s digital economy, with Lagos at the forefront, housing thousands of businesses and startups.
Mr Alake said the Kasi Cloud facility represents Lagos’ entry into “large-scale hyperscale AI infrastructure,” signalling the state’s ambition to evolve beyond being known primarily as a startup hub into a major centre for digital infrastructure and AI computing.
“Lagos is no longer simply a startup city,” he said. “It is an infrastructure city.”
The Kasi LOS1 facility is designed as a 40MW hyperscale data centre campus, beginning operations with an initial 7.2MW IT load.
According to Mr Alake, the facility includes advanced GPU computing infrastructure powered by Nvidia H100 and H200 chips, alongside liquid cooling systems and cloud infrastructure services designed to support AI workloads.
The Lagos State government believes such infrastructure will become critical as AI adoption accelerates globally.
Mr Alake said the state is investing in fibre optic networks, smart city technologies, university innovation programmes, and digital government systems to prepare for the transition.
“The AI economy is going to require hundreds of megawatts,” he said. “The market has already made its decision about where digital infrastructure belongs.”
On his part, Mr Johnson Agbogun, co-founder and chief executive officer of Kasi Cloud, said the project was built to reduce Nigeria’s dependence on foreign cloud infrastructure and give African businesses more control over how their data and AI systems are developed.
“Nigerian enterprises are currently spending $850 million every year on foreign cloud infrastructure,” he said. “Every naira spent abroad on cloud and AI infrastructure helps build capabilities somewhere else.”
He added that the facility runs GPU-powered AI workloads from local enterprises and described the Lekki campus as “the beginning of Nigeria’s AI factory.”
“As artificial intelligence reshapes economies globally, the nations that control their own compute infrastructure and data will be the ones positioned to lead,” added Mr Kolawole Owodunni, NSIA’s Executive Director and Chief Information Officer.
The goal of Google Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind. Whether it is a quick fact to help with your daily hustle or a complex question about starting a new business, Nigerians rely on Search every single day.
Over the last year, Google has rapidly reimagined what Search can do with AI. The momentum has been incredible—just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users globally. As people have realised just how much more Search can do for them, they are searching more than ever before, reaching an all-time high in search queries last quarter. Today at Google I/O, Google shared the next step in its journey to bring together the best of a search engine with the best of AI.
To power this next chapter, Google is officially upgrading Search with Gemini 3.5 Flash as the new default model in AI Mode for everyone worldwide. Delivering sustained frontier performance for agents and coding, Gemini 3.5 Flash is the engine driving the new era of AI-powered Search. Because curiosity doesn’t always fit into standard keywords, this powerful AI model is transforming Search from a tool that simply finds information into an intelligent platform capable of reasoning, monitoring the web, and executing complex tasks on your behalf.
Here is a look at the four biggest AI-powered announcements coming to Google Search:
1. A Completely Reimagined Search Box
Google is introducing the biggest upgrade to its Search box in over 25 years. Now completely reimagined with AI, the new intelligent Search box dynamically expands to give you the space to describe exactly what you need. It goes beyond simple autocomplete by anticipating your intent and helping you phrase your questions. You are no longer limited to typing; you can now search using text, images, files, videos, or even Chrome tabs as inputs. Additionally, Google is making it easier to ask follow-up questions directly from an AI Overview, flowing naturally into a conversational back-and-forth where your context stays with you as you explore.
2. New Search Agents That Work in the Background
We are entering the era of Search agents, where you can create and manage multiple AI agents directly in Search. Google is launching “Information agents” that operate in the background 24/7. These agents intelligently scan the web—alongside fresh data on finance, shopping, and sports—to monitor for changes related to your specific questions. For example, if you are house hunting, your agent will continuously scan the market and notify you the moment a listing matches your exact criteria. Furthermore, Search is expanding its agentic booking capabilities; you can soon share specific criteria (like a late-night private karaoke room) and Search will pull the latest pricing and links to finish booking. For certain categories, Google can even call businesses on your behalf.
3. Custom Mini-Apps and Visuals Built Just for You
Search is no longer just returning links; it is now building the ideal response in the perfect format for your query entirely on the fly. By bringing the power of Google Antigravity and the agentic coding capabilities of Gemini 3.5 Flash into Search, users will get a custom “Generative UI.” This means Search can design custom layouts, interactive visuals, tables, graphs, or simulations in real-time. But it goes a step further: if you have an ongoing task, like establishing a new health routine, Search can actually code a custom fitness tracker or mini-app for you. These custom dashboards tap into real-time sources like live maps and weather, giving you a personalised tracker you can return to again and again.
4. Expanded Personal Intelligence Without a Subscription
For AI to be truly helpful, it shouldn’t just know the world’s information—it should understand your personal context, too. To achieve this, Google is expanding Personal Intelligence in AI Mode to more people in nearly 200 countries and territories across 98 languages. Crucially, this is being rolled out with no subscription required. Users can securely connect apps like Gmail, Google Photos, and soon Google Calendar directly to Search. Designed with transparency and choice at its heart, this allows you to safely ask Search to find information buried in your own personal files, always keeping you in complete control of your connected data.
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