The Human Behind the Machine: Meta’s Muse AI Raises a Bigger Question About Who Is Really Using Your Data

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Meta is selling a vision of the future in which artificial intelligence does not merely answer questions—it acts on your behalf . Its new personal AI agent, Muse , can send emails, shop online, book travel, browse websites and make phone calls to businesses. Meta describes it as a personal agent designed to take work off people's hands and operate with a degree of autonomy. But a Reuters investigation has exposed an uncomfortable complication. Behind at least some of Muse's supposedly autonomous phone calls, there have been humans . Meta has been testing what it called a “human concierge” in which contractors can take over calls initiated through Muse. Internal company posts reviewed by Reuters showed that the feature was enabled for about half of Meta's employees during testing. Employees could opt out, but some raised concerns that sensitive information could unintentionally reach contractors handling the calls. The story is bigger than Meta. It goes to...
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Nairobi Wants In: Kenya Moves to Ride the Wave of Dangote's $47.6 Billion Refinery IPO

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 How mobile-first investing apps could beat the regulators to building Africa's first linked capital market

What Happened: Africa's Biggest IPO Just Opened in Lagos

Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest man, has opened the continent's largest initial public offering to date. On September 14, Dangote Petroleum Refinery launched a ₦2.15 trillion ($1.6 billion) share sale on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX), pricing the sprawling Lagos facility at a staggering ₦63 trillion ($47.6 billion).

The listing is more than a Nigerian financial milestone — it's fast becoming a continental one. Within days of the offer opening, Kenya signaled it wants a piece of the action, and the route it's exploring says a lot about where African capital markets are actually headed.



Why Kenya Is Angling for a Slice of the Deal

Frank Mwiti, chief executive officer of the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), is pushing to bring East African investors into the Dangote offer before pursuing a future cross-listing of the refinery on the Nairobi bourse, sources familiar with the discussions say.

The timing is deliberate. In May, Dangote teased a secondary listing on the London Stock Exchange, but Dangote Group management has since paused international debuts for three years to build a solid trading track record first. That pause has left a gap — and Mwiti is seizing it, betting that regional East African demand can be proven now, well ahead of any future London listing.

The Real Story: Retail Apps Are Already Ahead of the Regulators

Formal stock exchange cross-listings are notoriously slow, often dragging through years of regulatory back-and-forth between national securities commissions. But retail fintech apps aren't waiting for any of that.

Platforms like Bamboo already let retail investors subscribe to IPOs from Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda without setting foot inside a brokerage. In Kenya itself, homegrown fintech Cloud9 goes a step further, letting local retail users participate directly from their phones — no cross-border paperwork required on their end.

That's the quiet engine behind Mwiti's push. Rather than leading with treaty negotiations and cross-listing agreements, he's leaning on consumer appetite that already exists. Prove the retail demand first through apps East Africans already use, then use that momentum to justify the harder regulatory work of a full Nairobi cross-listing.

Why It Matters for Investors and the Continent

Cross-border equity sales within Africa remain rare, largely because of strict currency controls and clearing systems that don't talk to each other across borders. That's historically made it easier for African capital to flow to London or New York than to a neighboring country.

What's happening around the Dangote listing suggests a workaround is emerging from the bottom up. Retail fintechs and forward-leaning exchange executives are effectively stitching together a linked African capital market one product listing at a time — without waiting for the African Union or regional trade blocs to sign off on formal multilateral frameworks.

For everyday investors in Nairobi, Kampala, or Dar es Salaam, that means a shot at owning a piece of one of the continent's most talked-about industrial assets is now a few taps away, even if the official exchange-to-exchange plumbing is still years off.

What to Watch Next

Mwiti isn't just chasing one deal. Sources say he's using the Lagos talks as a foothold to build out a broader energy investment pipeline on the Nairobi exchange — potentially opening the door to Dangote-linked supply ventures, renewable energy firms, and fuel logistics operators listing or cross-listing in Kenya down the line.

Big regional infrastructure projects are part of that long-term picture too. The East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), for instance, could eventually tap regional equity markets to help fund its next phase, rather than relying purely on expensive foreign loans. If that shift happens, the Dangote-Nairobi talks now underway could end up looking like the opening move in a much larger realignment of how East Africa finances its energy future.

The Bottom Line

Dangote's ₦2.15 trillion refinery IPO was always going to be a Nigerian story first. But Kenya's push to get East African money into the deal — riding on apps like Bamboo and Cloud9 rather than waiting on formal exchange treaties — signals something bigger: African capital markets may end up getting stitched together by consumer fintech before governments finish drafting the paperwork.

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