Africa will leapfrog. Again.
That was the consensus running through a panel at WiT Africa featuring Mike McGearty, CEO and co-founder of Meili, Tania Platt, global head of B2B travel at Visa and Adebayo Adedeji, group CEO of WakaNow.
To a packed room of close to 200 delegates at Innovation City Cape Town on Thursday, the three leaders made their “10 Big Bets on Travel,” from online penetration forecasts to AI’s impact to the battle between giants and ants—but one big theme kept surfacing, the same one that underpins every market that has ever leapfrogged and is increasingly critical in the age of AI—trust.
“In Africa, trust is the currency in travel,” said Adedeji, “and it is super critical that the African customer gets what he pays for. The rest is not that complicated—for African consumers, it’s about ‘if I pay you for X, do I get X.’”
AI will be the catalyst but Africa will use AI differently
First, in line with the conference theme, “The Next 20,” the panelists were asked to take a bet on what online travel share in Africa would be by 2045, relative to the rest of the world.
According to Phocuswright’s data across 40 markets, global travel bookings totaled $1.93 trillion dollars last year and are on track to reach $2.14 trillion in 2027, with online share going from 63% to 67% by 2027. Meanwhile in Asia, the online share went from 17.4% in 2009 to 65.4% in 2025.
Platt went straight for 70% plus. Recalling her time when she worked in telco in Africa, she said, “People were sending money to mobile phones while the rest of the world was on credit cards, and that was 20 years ago.”
McGearty went higher. “I think Africa will be 80% plus,” he said. “The foundations will be there for a massive flow, and AI will be the catalyst that pushes it forward.”
Adedeji was more measured—but only in geography. He separated Africa into tiers: the sophisticated markets of South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Morocco, which he sees reaching 80% to 90% online penetration, and the broader continent, where he’d call it closer to 50% to 60%.
But the caveat, he said, was more interesting than the number. “We will use AI very differently than the rest of the world.”
As Africa skipped credit cards and went straight to mobile payments and bypassed desktop internet and built habits on mobile-first ecosystems, Adedeji said the next leap may be in interface.
Instead of traditional search and booking flows, he said the future may sit inside conversations—messaging platforms, AI agents—that is, “not going onto a browser, but having an agent in your WhatsApp that knows what you want.”
In other words, conversational commerce as the default layer of travel.
Who wins in the new world?
The panelists were then asked to make a bet on who would win in the age of AI—Supplier direct? B2B infrastructure? The aggregator? The super app?
McGearty made the case for supplier direct—but conditionally. “If suppliers get their distribution strategy right now, they can win. If they let intermediaries drive and then hand over to AI agents, they’ll lose. They need to learn from what happened with Google 20 years ago.”
Platt bet on the plumbing—the underlying infrastructure providers who will, in an agentic world, be the ones making sure everything works seamlessly in the background. “It’s not going to be about the pretty website,” she said. “It’s going to be about the people locked into that infrastructure.”
Adedeji went for the aggregator. “The customer just wants simple solutions in simple places. The guy who has it all together—that’s the guy who wins.”
The audience voted. The aggregator took it.
Ants vs giants. Domain expertise vs AI prompts.
When elephants trample in the grass, ants get crushed—it’s a line you hear a lot at WiT Africa.
How do ants compete when giants are now scrambling to position themselves in a world where discovery is shifting from links to answers and where all the big OTAs as well as suppliers have made partnership deals with the LLMs.
McGearty, positioning Meili as a technology enabler rather than a competitor to the big players, said the key for smaller companies is to be adaptable, cost-efficient and to stay close to the strategy of the global travel companies they serve.
More than 90% of Meili’s code is now written by AI—but, he was careful to add, guided by very experienced developers and leaders with domain expertise. “If you tell AI to do something amazing, it will deliver something amazing. If you tell it to do something rubbish, it will do that too.”
He stressed that domain expertise has become even more critical in the age of AI and this will be what separates the winners from the losers in the coming years.
Platt pointed to the alleyways. The giants may own the highway, she said, but there are things they simply will not invest in. Local knowledge, the specific safari, at the specific lodge, at the specific time of year. “The specialists will still be there. The game to be won is local knowledge and the delivery of it.”
Adedeji offered three survival rules for smaller players. First, own the relationship layer. “Even in a startup, you need to own that. Once you own it, you become the preferred source.” Second, when the big systems go down—visa portals, airline APIs, anything—be the person your customers call.
“I made two calls on behalf of the customer and solved a problem in minutes that a big platform couldn’t touch.”
Third, and most strategically: build what the agents can run, but what the giants can’t easily acquire. For WakaNow, that meant going after the Umrah market—securing a license to issue Umrah visas in a process that, as Adedeji put it, involved traveling to Saudi Arabia and lots of meetings as well as mosque visits “to get one of the contracts signed.” (WakaNow is one of eight OTAs that have been appointed to issue Umrah visas online.)
“It requires a lot of local behavior to get some things done and that’s the future. That’s not something any algorithm can replicate.”
Yet he also acknowledged the AI paradox. Yes, it gives power to local OTAs such as WakaNow to scale globally—the Nigerian-based OTA is now present in eight markets—but it also gives global players the ability to scale locally.
Something Adedeji agrees with—which is why he said, “You can go global. But you must also defend local.”
What won’t change: Trust, laziness and the human need for care
The panel also reflected on what will endure. Trust, overwhelmingly, topped the list.
“If you lose trust,” said McGearty, “you lose the customer. Price won’t matter.”
But there were other constants. Platt pointed to “laziness”—not as a flaw, but as a desire for seamlessness. Travelers don’t want to plan; they want outcomes.
Adedeji reframed it more personally. “The more affluent the customer, the more they want to call you,” he said. “They don’t want to click. They want to be taken care of.”
The new language of leadership
Just as AI has introduced a new vocabulary into travel—LLM, MCP, A2A—the panelists were asked, what’s the new language of leadership? What does AI mean for you, as a leader?
McGearty talked about agentic accountability—the idea that leaders are no longer just managing humans, but managing agents and that the ground rules, ethics and context you set for those agents will define what they deliver.
Platt brought it back to relationships. “People buy from people. That won’t change.” The new language of leadership, she suggested, is actually an old one—amplified.
Adedeji talked about speed and cost. Proposals built in real time during client meetings.
Deployment cycles that used to take two weeks now done in 54 hours. Ideas that used to sit in the parking lot now executed immediately.
“AI does not take health insurance. It does not fall sick. It does not get stuck in traffic.” But then, he pulled back from the ledge. He told the story of a customer who threatened to stop using WakaNow if they removed the human travel agents from their centers. “Taibo is my human contact. When I enter there, I see a smile. We talk about my children. You can’t take that away.”
The consensus—the future is hybrid, those who manage both well, will win.
As Stephan Ekbergh, chairman of Travelstart and co-founder of Innovation City Cape Town, said in his opening, “Travel is built on two things—technology and relationships. One moves us forward, one keeps us together.”
This story originally appeared in WiT.