Welcome back to Data Under Glass, where we surface the patterns your pitch decks ignore and the risks your models can't see.
Two stories defined the final quarter of 2025.
In North America, 40% of enterprise applications are racing toward agentic integration by the end of 2026. Billions are flowing into systems designed to plan, execute, and optimize without human oversight. The promise: infinite scale with zero headcount.
In Africa, startups raised over $3.5 billion in 2025, a 59% surge that ended the two-year funding winter. But the narrative has shifted; it's no longer about "disruption" but about infrastructure that works when everything else fails.
While one market is betting on intelligence, the other is betting on utility.
By mid-2026, we'll know which bet was built on sand.
— Anderson Oz'.
From The Operator's Desk
The $4.2M Deflection Disaster
Case In Point: B2B SaaS, Series A, North America
Raised: $12M
The Pitch: Deploy AI agents to automate customer success workflows. Three-month pilot showed 40% reduction in support tickets and the board loved the metrics. Full rollout budget approved: $4.2M for agent infrastructure, $2.8M in engineering hours.
What We Caught: The agents worked, technically. They answered questions, routed tickets, closed simple cases. Support volume dropped exactly as projected.
But we ran the numbers underneath the numbers.
Customer satisfaction fell 18% and churn climbed 12%. Users weren't getting better service. They were getting trapped in automated loops that deflected problems instead of solving them.
The metric looked good but the business was walking dead.
The Reality: 39% of organizations are experimenting with agents, but only 23% have successfully scaled them beyond a single business function. The gap between pilot and production isn't technical. It's operational.
Most agents are rebranded chatbots; they route, they respond but don't reason. And customers can tell the difference within 30 seconds.
The Intervention: We ran a two-week reality audit, interviewed 40 customers. Analyzed 2,000+ support interactions. The truth was brutal: customers didn't want faster ticket resolution. What they wanted was products that didn't break.
The fix wasn't better agents but better software.
We reallocated the $4.2M agent budget to product stability. Customer satisfaction recovered within 90 days. Support volume dropped 31%, not through deflection, but through prevention.
The Lesson: Gartner predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, and what they're now calling "agent-washing", rebranding basic automation as autonomous intelligence.
Agents aren't the problem but building them to hide broken products is.
The Two Markets: Intelligence vs. Infrastructure
North America's Bet: The Leap of Faith
The thesis sounds perfect: automate multi-stage workflows, build the human-less startup, scale infinitely with minimal headcount. 57% of organizations now deploy agents for cross-functional processes spanning multiple teams.
In 2026, we'll see organizations that employ more AI agents than humans. Small teams doing the work of hundreds. Software writing itself and customer support running 24/7 with zero human cost.
Until the model changes, the API goes down and a customer asks something the agent wasn't trained for.
The Cracks:
Data exfiltration risks and vendor lock-in create fragility at scale
Memory constraints: agents lack deep context to learn from past executions without constant human oversight
Reliability gaps: if even 5% of agentic function is imprecise, it derails entire workflows
Cost creep: many "agentic" systems burn $10-50K monthly in API costs per workflow
Africa's Bet: The Utility Multiplier
Africa isn't racing to automate. It's racing to electrify, connect, and transact.
VCs pivoted hard in 2025. Out: consumer apps burning through runway. In: payment rails, mobility networks, clean energy infrastructure, B2B SaaS with recurring revenue.
The numbers tell the story: clean energy surpassed fintech as the top-funded sector by Q3 2025, securing 53% of all investments, nearly $950 million. Kenya alone captured 57% of Q3 clean energy funding at $560.9 million.
But here's the real signal: venture debt surpassed equity for the first time in 2025, representing 45% of total funding. This isn't a symptom of funding winter. It's a maturation signal.
Banks and development finance institutions are lending against cash flows, not potential. When debt markets open up, it means investors see real revenue, real customers, and real unit economics.
Africa isn't ignoring AI, it's refusing to automate poverty.
The Profitability Pivot: Why Moniepoint Is The Blueprint
While North American founders chase "agentic ROI," Moniepoint became Africa's first profitable fintech unicorn in October 2025.
The Numbers:
$250 billion+ in annual transaction volume
10 million active customers
$200 million Series C at $1 billion valuation
Profitable since 2024
The Strategy:
Moniepoint didn't build a pure-play digital bank. They built a hybrid infrastructure: digital wallets backed by 2 million physical agents operating out of shops, markets, and kiosks across Nigeria.
When the internet goes down, transactions don't stop. When power fails, the network keeps moving. The technology is sophisticated, but it's wrapped in analog resilience.