Meta vs Microsoft: Tinashe Mukogo on how Big Tech AI strategy will reshape Africa’s digital economy

Andile Masuku

Meet Tinashe Mukogo

A recent WhatsApp exchange-turned-phone call with Money & Moves founder Tinashe Mukogo about Big Tech leadership had me reflecting on my coverage of Meta's world domination moves over the years. From examining Facebook's ambitious Libra cryptocurrency initiative in 2019 to my recent column about WhatsApp eating the world, I've followed the company's evolving ambitions to embed itself deeper into the global digital economy stack.

My chat with Mukogo revealed why this former Siemens executive turned independent consultant and media entrepreneur makes a compelling case for Microsoft’s Satya Nadella being American Big Tech's most impressive chief executive. Nadella’s a corporate leader whose achievements often get overshadowed by the mainstream's fascination with founder-CEOs like Zuckerberg (Meta), Musk (Tesla et al), Huang (NVIDIA) and Chesky (Airbnb).

Given Meta’s aggressive expansion into AI, I was keen to hear Mukogo’s thoughts on whether Mark Zuckerberg’s approach stands up to the competition. Our conversation quickly turned to Microsoft, a company that has, so far, played the AI game very differently.

Satya Nadella: Big Tech’s most underrated CEO?

"Satya's probably been the best CEO of them all," Mukogo observed, cutting through the typical founder-CEO hype with his assessment that "when it comes to heart-beat steady, critical execution and building out rock solid businesses, he probably has an edge."

It's his decidedly unsentimental takes on tech leadership that makes Mukogo's analysis of Meta's latest financials particularly compelling. Drawing on his chartered accountancy background and experience dissecting corporate statements, he reveals fascinating implications for how Meta's massive AI investments might reshape Africa's digital economy.

Mukogo's insights. In his words:

While at Deloitte, I discovered two reasons to love reading financial statements.

Firstly, they contain helpful, predictive data and insights into companies, industries, and where things are headed.

Secondly, and perhaps more obviously, considering how difficult they can be to read, generally, no one reads them unless they are paid or otherwise incentivised to do so. Even then, people don't often dive deeply.

That realisation showed me how financial statements could yield insights many people miss and help spot emerging trends before they become obvious.

Recently, while analysing Big Tech’s Q4 2024 earnings, I spotted something in Meta’s financials that could have major implications for AI in Africa—especially given WhatsApp’s ubiquity across the continent.

Why is Meta betting big on AI?

Meta's revenue for the year was up 22%, reaching $164 billion (R3 trillion). This is impressive for a 20-year-old company, particularly when compared to competitors—Google's advertising business and Snap grew revenue by 10% and 14%, respectively, while X's (formerly Twitter) revenue has been falling sharply.

The year also saw record revenue for the Reality Labs division, which produces Quest Virtual Reality headsets and Meta's AI sunglasses. Yet Meta remains fundamentally an advertising business, with 97% of revenue still derived from ads.

This creates an interesting problem for Meta when it comes to AI.

In the earnings call where the financial results were discussed, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta plans to spend "hundreds of billions of dollars" on AI infrastructure. How do you justify that level of investment if your core business is advertising?

Sure, AI can improve how ads are run, but that's an incremental improvement—not one that would warrant spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

This is where companies like Microsoft have an advantage.

AI-Powered Productivity: Microsoft’s competitive edge

The biggest opportunities in AI are currently in the productivity space, which is the core business Microsoft is in—think Excel, Outlook, Azure and others. This is the most compelling AI use case at the moment: making people more productive.

This could explain why, according to Microsoft's financial results, their AI business is already on course to generate $13 billion in revenue—the product-market fit is optimal.

After reading through all the numbers, one question lingered.

If Meta's business isn't the best place to capture value from AI, why is it planning to spend so much on AI infrastructure?

The first reason is one that Zuckerberg explicitly stated when discussing the financial results. Meta is betting on AI glasses being the next "computing platform". Zuckerberg sees a future in which people will have mobile phones, laptops and AI glasses.

This is possible but speculative. In 2024, 1 million people bought Meta's AI glasses—a far cry from the 1.24 billion smartphones shipped that year."

The other reason for the investment, which wasn't as explicit, was fear of missing out (FOMO)—which is understandable. AI is not just the next big thing—it is the thing.

In recent years, there has been much hype about NFTs, crypto and the Metaverse (which prompted Facebook to change its name to Meta). However, although these technologies were popular, they were not universally accepted.

For example, despite Bitcoin's increasing popularity, only about 79 public companies hold it on their balance sheets, and almost all are crypto-focused businesses—Tesla being the notable exception.

However, all major companies are investing incredible amounts of capital in AI. As the saying goes, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." With companies planning to spend over $300 billion on AI in 2025, ‘the AI future’ will be created.

Meta has decided to invest in AI capability even if it doesn't yet have a precise revenue generation mechanism like Microsoft.

WhatsApp: Meta’s biggest AI opportunity?

MetaAI will likely be the biggest winner from this investment, especially in WhatsApp.

MetaAI, which is currently a chat assistant embedded into Meta's apps, is reportedly on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world, driven by its accessibility in WhatsApp.

I think this connection to WhatsApp will be a game-changer.

While Instagram and Facebook are more used for social purposes and entertainment, WhatsApp is arguably the leading business communication and administration app across Africa (and indeed, the developing world).

Most businesses in Africa, small and large, use WhatsApp to run their operations. Whether communicating with customers or coordinating through groups, WhatsApp has become essential to daily business operations.

This means it represents Meta's most significant opportunity to transform itself from an advertising business into a "productivity business.” Imagine a small logistics business in Lagos using AI-driven WhatsApp bots to automate customer service and route planning in real time.

As time progresses, I expect to see more AI functionality embedded into WhatsApp—not just in WhatsApp Business but the standard version. It will likely become more of an operating system with layers of AI tools and applications. It’s not a stretch to imagine that, eventually, anything you can do on your laptop using AI will be possible within WhatsApp, from AI note-taking to AI scheduling.

We already see this trend as WhatsApp has added more productivity-focused features like scheduling.

Implications for Africa’s digital economy

As Meta continues to invest heavily in AI and WhatsApp's evolution, African users stand to benefit significantly from this confluence of messaging infrastructure and AI capability. While Meta's broader AI strategy remains to be proven, its dominance in African business communication through WhatsApp positions the continent's technology ecosystem to potentially play a pivotal role in shaping how AI-enabled productivity tools evolve in emerging markets.

Andile Masuku is Co-founder and Executive Producer at African Tech Roundup. Connect and engage with Andile on X (@MasukuAndile) and via LinkedIn.

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