By Adedapo Adesanya

The Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Mr Bosun Tijani, has projected that the digital economy to will contribute over one-fifth to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030.

Mr Tijani said this at the National Digital Economy and E-Governance Bill stakeholders’ engagement on Thursday in Abuja.

Mr Tijani was represented by the Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Mr Adeladan Rafiu, in his address, said that in Q1 2025, Nigeria’s digital economy contributed N7 trillion to real GDP, representing 14.19 per cent of the N49.34 trillion total GDP.

According to him, presently, the sector contributes 16 per cent to 18 per cent of GDP, with well-defined strategies to increase this to 21 per cent by 2030.

“These figures demonstrate both the current impact and the vast potential of a unified, digitally empowered economy driven by robust legislation,” he said.

Speaking on the importance of the bill, the minister said that it sought to establish a robust legal and regulatory framework that would guide the implementation of digital governance in Nigeria.

“We can ensure that this bill provides the solid legal foundation required to drive digital identity, aid governance and overall decision-making for Nigeria,” Mr Tijani said.

Also speaking, the Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Mr Kachifu Abdullahi, said that the bill would accelerate digitisation of the Nigerian economy.

“Everybody is contributing to see how we can build a legal and institutional framework for our national digital economy.

“Government is doing a lot in digital literacy to educate our citizens to develop their digital fluency, so that everyone will be part of it and deepen the financial inclusion as well,” he said

The National Commissioner of Nigerian Data Protection Commission (NDPC), Mr Vincent Olatunji, in his goodwill message, said that the digital economy sector was the most consistent in growth.

“I am not sure of any other sector where there is consistent progress in a particular sector and contributing highly to the growth of our economy,” he said.

Earlier, the Director-General of Galaxy BackBone (GBB), Mr Ibrahim Adeyanju, said that digital economy could not be mentioned without a digital infrastructure and that is where GBB comes in.

“The government has invested a lot in terms of infrastructure, which are there to support the digital economy,” he said.

By Modupe Gbadeyanka

A global technology company, Zoho, has introduced its proprietary large language model known as Zia LLM, trained specifically for business use cases, keeping privacy and governance at its core, which has resulted in lowering the inference cost, passing on that value to the customers, while also ensuring that they are able to utilise AI productively and efficiently.

In a statement, the company also announced the launched of a no-code agent builder, Zia Agent Studio, over 25 deployable Zia agents, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to open up its vast library of actions to third-party agents.

The Country Head for Zoho Nigeria, Mr Kehinde Ogundare, noted that these products demonstrate the organisation’s longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities because of the business context, and value.

Zia LLM leveraged NVIDIA’s AI accelerated computing platform. It comprises three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimised for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market.

The three models allow Zoho to always optimise the right model for the right user context, striking the balance between power and resource management. In the short term, Zoho will scale Zia LLM’s model sizes, starting with the first set of parameter increases by the end of 2025.

While Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues its commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on its servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud providers.

As for the Zia Agent Studio, Zoho has simplified it to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and includes ready-made access to over 700 actions across its products.

Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered by button click, with rule-based automation, or even summoned within customer conversations.

To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on the role of the user. These include Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk that can process incoming customer requests, understand the context, and either answer directly or triage them to a human rep, providing an efficient first line of assistance.

At the time of deployment, an agent can be provisioned as a digital employee, maintaining the user access permission structure defined within the organisation. Admins can perform behavioural audits as well as performance and impact analyses on digital employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails.

These agents are available in Agent Marketplace from where customers can easily deploy them. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace in coming months.

The company plans to add more skills to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams, Customer Support teams to start with. Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms.

By Adedapo Adesanya