A lot of the conversation around artificial intelligence in Uganda still treats it as something coming, some future event still a few years off that we can prepare for whenever we get around to it. Michael Niyitegeka, Director at Refactory, doesn't think that clock is still running.

Speaking at the State of the Digital Economy event held on July 24th 2026 at the Next Media park, Niyitegeka said it plainly. "AI is not the future, we are already living in the AI era. The rest of us are simply playing catch up." It is a small shift in tense that changes the whole conversation. If AI is already here, then every debate framed as "how do we prepare for AI" is really a debate about people who are already behind, not people with time to spare.

That reframing carries into the question he thinks Uganda keeps getting wrong. "The real question is not whether AI will create or eliminate jobs," he said. "The question is: who will be ready when those opportunities emerge?" Most public debate about AI and work gets stuck on the first question, whether the technology is a net job creator or a net job destroyer, as if the answer changes what anyone should actually be doing right now. Niyitegeka's point is that the answer barely matters if the workforce isn't ready either way. Jobs will shift, some will disappear, new ones will appear elsewhere, and readiness, not the direction of the shift, decides who ends up on which side of that change.

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Refactory has spent years training software engineers and technologists across the region, so this isn't an abstract worry for Niyitegeka, it's the daily reality of the gap between what graduates arrive knowing and what the market, increasingly shaped by AI, actually needs. Waiting for policy or curriculum reform to eventually catch up isn't really an option when the technology is already reshaping which skills matter, month by month, not decade by decade.

So maybe the honest starting point isn't debating whether AI will help or hurt Uganda's job market. It's admitting that whichever way it goes, most people aren't ready yet, and that readiness, not the technology itself, is the thing actually within our control.