In 2025, Nigerian creators use AI to scale. Yet they fear its flaws.

For most Nigerian content creators, staying online is often the easiest part of the job. The real struggle happens in the background: creators wrestle with erratic data connections and the daunting task of tailoring global technology to a local audience. For years, the solution was simply to work harder, but in 2025, the game changed. This year, artificial intelligence (AI) moved from a playground for the curious to the engine room for the productive. 

With limited infrastructure, rising data costs, and intense competition for attention, efficiency is no longer optional but essential to survival and growth. AI offers creators practical ways to compress time, reduce costs, and compete on a global stage without expanding their teams or budgets. These tools are reshaping how Nigerian creators sustain their work, scale their output, and remain visible in an increasingly crowded creator economy.

I spoke to some top Nigerian content creators, including Fisayo Fosudo, Mercy Thaddeus, and Akunne Emmanuel, to understand how they are integrating AI into their creative workflow to improve efficiency and output, as well as the creative decisions they refuse to hand over to machines.

Scripting and narrative architecture

The most immediate impact of AI this year has been the death of the “blank page” syndrome, a common challenge where creators stare at an empty page or screen, struggling to turn ideas into structured content. For many creators, the process of moving from a raw idea to a structured narrative has been compressed from hours into a matter of minutes.

Akunne Emmanuel, the tech creator who breaks down product design to his audience on his BuildWithDudu Instagram page,  often starts his creative process with a rough personal script. He uses AI to refine the angle and ensure the message flows naturally.  

“Once I have an idea, I can generate a strong first-pass outline in under ten minutes, then spend my time refining tone and insight instead of staring at a blank page,” Emmanuel says. 

Mercy Thaddeus, an AI content creator who breaks down Artificial Intelligence for her audience and is known as Mercythaddeus_ on Instagram, says she uses Gemini for “refining my scripts.

Refining scripts with Gemini is part of a wider shift in how creative work is being produced globally. Generative AI tools are increasingly used not just for grammar or tone, but for structuring ideas, tightening narratives, and speeding up production cycles. According to findings from research presented by Adobe MAX, which surveyed over 16,000 creators across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, India, and Australia to examine the mindsets, behaviours, and expectations shaping the future of creative work and the creator economy.

The study found that a significant majority of creators now integrate AI into their workflows, particularly for writing, editing, and ideation, seeing these tools as collaborators that help them work faster and push their ideas further rather than replacements for human creativity.

TechCabal’s content creator, Ayodeji Aboderin, turned to AI in 2025 to build what he calls “content engines. By feeding frameworks into models like ChatGPT, he can deconstruct complex technical topics into simple, relatable stories. Aboderin explains the shift in his process: “It makes it very, very easy to break down ideas and make [them] into simple ways the audience can understand.”

Technical prototyping and visualisation

In a market where high-quality stock footage or a dedicated design team can be prohibitively expensive, creators are using AI to “show” rather than just “tell.” Beyond the written word, AI has become a silent partner in the production of visual assets and technical demonstrations.

Thaddeus leverages her background in software engineering to use AI coding assistants to change how she presents products. 

“I know how to build products, but it is time-consuming and often requires a team,” she says. “ Before, building a landing page or a simple tool would take a full day of coding. Now, I can use AI coding assistants to spin up a functional prototype or a clean UI in about 20 minutes. This allows me to show rather than just tell in my videos.”

Aboderin has adopted a similar approach for visual storytelling, noting that he no longer spends hours scouring sites like Unsplash. He now generates bespoke visual assets to illustrate specific narratives. 

“It [is] easy to visualise with AI, as opposed to looking for imagery or visuals that will tell [a] story.  I [don’t] have to go and search for it. I just generate it from scratch,” he says.

Research and deep exploration

Research has traditionally been the most time-consuming part of the creative cycle, but in 2025, AI agents have taken over the heavy lifting of data gathering. 

Fisayo Fosudo uses tools like Gemini to explore different angles for his famous gadget reviews. Rather than relying on AI for the “news” itself, he uses it to figure out how to “attack” a topic or discover which elements of a new device are most relevant to his audience. 

“We do our research [by ourselves]. We just use [AI] to explore different angles of how to tackle stuff, rather than rely on it like ‘this is the news,” Fosudo explains. 

Aboderin takes this a step further by deploying AI agents to scan patterns and recurring conversations across the web. “I can automate that process and send agents on errands to learn about it while I do other stuff,” he says.

However, this efficiency comes with a caveat; Fosudo warns that AI-driven research can often present outdated information as current fact: “Websites may have an article from 2003, but the date [on the AI-researched article] says 2025, so I don’t rely on information given to me.”

Strategic outreach and monetisation

The impact of AI has also bled into the business side of content creation, specifically in how creators manage their professional relationships. While AI doesn’t replace the networking required to land a big deal, it has significantly reduced the friction of communication. Creators now use AI tools to draft outreach emails to brands, generate personalised pitch decks, and summarise long email threads for quicker follow-ups. Some also rely on AI to create meeting notes, refine proposals, or adapt the same pitch across multiple platforms, allowing them to spend more time building relationships and negotiating deals rather than wrestling with repetitive administrative tasks.

Emmanuel says he uses  AI to structure outreach and follow-ups, adding that “while AI doesn’t replace relationship-building, it supports it by removing friction and delays in calculating responses.” 

Thaddeus finds that AI helps her overcome writer’s block when drafting cold emails and proposals, ensuring her outreach is “professional and clear.” 

Indirectly, this efficiency is driving better monetisation. Thaddeus notes that by cutting down the time spent on scripting and coding, she has more time to build actual assets: “These projects build my portfolio, which attracts high-value clients.”

The Nigerian context gap

Despite the efficiency gains, there is a clear consensus among these creators: AI is not 100% accurate.

Globally, concerns about AI accuracy, bias, and hallucinations have followed the technology as it spreads across creative, academic, and professional fields. Large language models are known to generate confident but incorrect outputs, blur facts, and reproduce gaps in the data they are trained on. As creators’ credibility depends on trust and relevance, these weaknesses are a limit. In Nigeria, where context, timing, and cultural specificity are critical, the margin for error is even thinner.

“AI typically does not understand the Nigerian context; it exaggerates,” Emmanuel says. “ Authenticity and local relevance still come from lived experience.”

Thaddeus is vocal about the fact that she never uses AI for local trends: The [AI] models often hallucinate or are outdated when it comes to hyper-local contexts.” She says she still relies on X and local news blogs to spot what’s actually happening on the ground. 

Emmanuel echoes this sentiment, noting that AI systems trained on global data often miss the cultural subtext. 

“Most AI systems are trained on global data, which means they don’t naturally understand local nuances, timing, or cultural subtext, especially in a market like Nigeria. That gap requires intentional human judgment. Without it, content can sound accurate but disconnected. Learning where AI helps and where it misleads has been the real work,” Emmanuel says.

The disconnection that emanates from AI use has led to a human-first research model where creators like Thaddeus do the heavy lifting manually and only use AI to refine the grammar of the facts they’ve already verified.

The human boundary

Ahead of 2026, the line in the sand for Nigerian creators is that AI cannot replicate a personal opinion or a unique personality.

Fosudo is particularly adamant about the “creepiness” of AI in certain commercial contexts, arguing that the human element is non-negotiable. “Seeing ads of food and the food is AI is weird. [Also] if your skincare brand is doing [ads], they shouldn’t use an AI [face],” he says. 

Thaddeus and Emmanuel conclude that the connection with the audience is built on trust, which is fundamentally a human transaction. 

As Thaddeus puts it, “AI can give me facts, but it cannot have a perspective. My experiences and my personal opinions on the industry are things AI cannot replicate.”

In the Nigerian creative space, AI is the engine, but the creator remains firmly in the driver’s seat.