Source: Substack
A $60 smartphone app that authenticates malaria medication in Lagos reveals how AI verification tools are racing ahead of supply chain infrastructure in emerging markets—where counterfeit drugs kill an estimated 100,000+ people annually. Someone in Lagos is building a profitable business by solving a problem that multinational pharma and governments have failed to address. Detection tools will likely proliferate faster in regions where they're most desperate than where they're most regulated. This inverts the typical tech adoption curve: AI's highest-impact applications may emerge not from Silicon Valley's assumptions about which problems matter, but from entrepreneurs who face immediate, lethal consequences for getting it wrong.