Timothy Durosawo
Technology and AI transformation, carried through to production
Applied AI · Data platforms · Systems architecture · Product engineering
Fifteen years across fintech, financial intelligence, healthcare, e-commerce, agritech and education
Technology. Strategy. Impact.
I lead technology and AI transformation and carry it through to production: knowledge graphs from unstructured text, retrieval grounded in live databases, model-agnostic architecture, and governed decisioning with explicit limits on what a model may decide. I write about the economics and measurement of enterprise AI in Insights.
I have spent over fifteen years building and running digital products across fintech, healthcare, e-commerce and business automation. Founders and SMEs come to me with an idea; consultancies and agencies come with a client they have already sold. I own the same part in both: the architecture, the build, and keeping it running.
What the work taught.
Four positions, each one paid for by a system that is still running.
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01
Standards are global
Reference material, tooling, and benchmarks are public. Where a system is built says nothing about the standard it should be held to.
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02
Build past the next quarter
Short horizons produce work that has to be redone. Durable structure costs less than repeated rescue.
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03
Systems run unsupervised
If a process needs me present, it is a habit rather than a system. Encode the rules and measure outcomes, not activity.
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04
Depth is the differentiator
Tooling made prototypes cheap and surface-level competence abundant. The advantage sits with whoever keeps going after the demo works.
What I actually build.
Strategy is easier to claim than to demonstrate, so this is the hands-on part. I write the code, design the schemas, and own the production incidents. Three areas carry most of the work.
Applied artificial intelligence
- Retrieval grounded in production data rather than a detached index
- Structured extraction and classification from unstructured sources
- Model-agnostic architecture, so providers remain interchangeable
- Governed decisioning with explicit limits on what a model may decide
Data transformation
- Ingestion, normalisation, and deduplication at scale
- Entity resolution and relationship mapping
- Knowledge graphs built from unstructured text
- Document and vision-based extraction where plain parsing fails
Platform engineering
- Distributed services, scheduled workers, and queue-driven processing
- Multi-tenant isolation and role-based access control
- Cost and quota engineering under real ceilings
- Observability, fail-soft behaviour, and graceful degradation
Working stack
The architecture behind these systems, and the constraints that shaped them, is documented on the artificial intelligence page.
What I've built, and what it does.
Fifteen years of it, across fintech, financial intelligence, healthcare, e-commerce, agritech, education and enterprise operations. The through-line is the same in all of them: strategy that reaches production, and stays running afterwards.
- 76 deployed projects
- 44 software projects
- 8 countries
United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana.
A continuously updated knowledge graph connecting more than 100,000 companies, 35,000 people and 270,000 market events, fed by a news-intelligence network spanning over 7,200 domains. It is assembled from unstructured sources and served to analysts as decision support rather than search results. The hard parts are entity resolution across contradictory sources, ingestion that does not fall behind the news, and retrieval grounded in the graph instead of a detached index. I own the architecture and the engineering, as Rippli AI's CTO.
Kinetic threats and non-kinetic hazards — banditry, insurgency and election violence alongside lead poisoning, oil-spill health impacts and disease outbreaks — resolved into a single per-location view for Nigeria. Sources disagree, coverage is uneven, and the method has to be defensible in public: I co-authored the methodology paper. Co-founded as Kobostreet.
Digital platforms across education, certification, fintech and content, and CRM systems that carry a business's operations rather than sitting beside them. Multi-tenant isolation, role-based access, queue-driven processing and the cost engineering that keeps all of it inside real ceilings. Built through Diranx Solutions, ImpulseCRM and Kobo Solutions, the last of these serving UK clients.
Durable consumer technology taken from engineering design through manufacture, at Picharge. Physical products are unforgiving in a way software is not — you cannot patch a moulding — and the discipline carries back into everything else.
Systems taken from ideation to deployment where the constraints are real: compliance, intermittent infrastructure, finite budgets, and users who cannot be trained out of how they already work. Translating a business objective into an execution plan, then owning the plan through to production and past it.
Sectors where complexity is the norm.
Tim's long-term interests centre on building scalable, technology-driven institutions that drive economic growth and transformation across Africa and beyond. In practice the problems worth solving tend to sit where data is messy, budgets are finite, and the answer has to be defensible.
Financial Intelligence
Market data, entity graphs, and event analysis at scale.
Economic Development
Programme design, measurement, and governed decisioning.
Education
Learning platforms, assessment, and credentialing.
Commerce & SMB
Inventory, point of sale, invoicing, and payments.
Media & Publishing
Content pipelines, distribution, and multi-tenant delivery.
Civic & Non-Profit
Operations for institutions that must run unattended.
Professional Recognition
Selected among the top 1.1% of applicants for the SAP Young Professionals Program Nigeria, with advanced training in enterprise systems, business process integration, design thinking, and digital business operations.
Gained exposure to venture capital, startup ecosystems, innovation strategy, and venture-building across African technology markets through this highly competitive fellowship program.
Academic Foundation
Governance, Civic & Public Leadership
Tim has participated in leadership and governance development programmes focused on public leadership, institutional development, and executive capacity building across Africa. These experiences complement his technology and product expertise with a broader perspective on leadership, organizational systems, innovation ecosystems, and sustainable development.
Alumnus of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) Regional Leadership Center West Africa, where he completed the Emerging Leaders Programme focused on leadership, civic engagement, entrepreneurship, and regional development.
Completed the CPLP programme at the School of Politics, Policy and Governance, strengthening his understanding of leadership, governance systems, policy development, and institutional transformation within emerging economies.
Non-profit work.
Two organisations built to keep operating after the founder's attention moves elsewhere.
Sustaining Peace Foundation
Empowering 2,000+ widows and 5,000+ orphans in Cameroon over 7 years.
sustainingpeacefoundation.orgCycle 28
Breaking poverty cycles through digital skills, survival support, and mentorship since 2016.
cycle28.orgLet's Build Something That Matters
A strategic conversation, a delivery partnership, or something new entirely — if you have read this far, we should talk.