Gartner predicts that by the end of 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will use task-specific AI agents, up from less than 5% in 2025.
The AI agent market crossed $7.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed $50 billion by 2030. McKinsey estimates generative AI could add between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion annually to global GDP.
Salesforce research shows a 282% jump in AI adoption across organizations. Google Cloud's 2026 AI Agent Trends report describes the current moment as "the agent leap," where AI moves from answering prompts to running entire workflows semi-autonomously.
Yet, most of the conversation around AI agents has been happening in North America, Europe, and parts of Asia.
- Salesforce using autonomous agents in its CRM.
- Microsoft running over 100 agents across its supply chain.
- Oracle embedding role-based AI logic into its Fusion Cloud for finance and compliance.
Africa, in the global narrative, has been largely absent from this part of the story.
Until recently, through the efforts of a curious individual—Kayode Faturoti.
What Liners Is, and Why It's Different
Liners, a software review and discovery platform built for the African market, has recently launched.
It's the platform to find products, reviews, comparisons, alternatives, funding data, company profiles, investor directories, events, and news, all focused on software built for or by the African continent.
The founder, Kayode Faturoti, known as Kay, is a Dubai-based entrepreneur with years of experience in Fintech, crypto, and technology as a whole. The idea for Liners came from a personal frustration during a family vacation in Bali.
Kay was trying to build a Slack alternative because he'd been paying a ridiculous amount for team seats. He found an open-source alternative and started coding. Hours in, he realized the Slack alternative was missing key features.
It was pointless and simply a waste of time.
The frustration triggered a bigger question: what if there was a place to find real alternatives, with real reviews, before wasting his time? And what if that place was built for Africa, where teams, founders, and employees needed to make better software decisions?
Not finding an answer, Kay chalked up and built Liners—the platform he'd wished existed.
On paper, Liners seems like the G2 equivalent Africa has lacked for years. But Liners doesn't operate the way G2 does, not even close.
Liners runs on nine AI agents—each with a defined role, a personality, and a name.
- Standup Stevo manages operations and reports to the founder.
- DD Dave discovers new products and companies across Africa.
- QA Quinn reviews everything DD Dave finds for accuracy.
- LGTM Larry ships new platform features.
- Postmortem Peter checks for bugs in Larry's work.
- Whiteboard Wasiu handles brainstorming and creative strategy.
- Agent Ammie investigates every single review for fraud and bias.
- Touch Base Tony manages outreach and emails.
- TLDR Tara writes all content on the platform.
Each agent has a coded role, a defined personality, a voice...and they all talk to each other.
Managing a Team of AI Agents in a "Fun" Way
There's a feature on Liners that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.
It's called Agent HQ.
Agent HQ is a live, public chat feed on the Liners homepage where the nine agents communicate with each other in real time. You can watch DD Dave report a new product he discovered. See QA Quinn flag a listing that doesn't meet quality standards. Catch Postmortem Peter flagging a bug. Watch TLDR Tara get roasted for a content summary.
All of it happening in a Slack-style feed, visible to anyone who visits the site.
It started as a private channel. When Kay first built the agent system, he needed visibility into what the agents were doing behind the scenes. "When you have AI doing things in the background, it sounds cool," he said. "But it's AI, and you should be in the loop of what they're doing."
So, he set up a reporting structure on Slack. Every agent, once it completed a task, would report what it did.
At first, the messages were just...boring.
"You can't just tell me you're done with something and... so? No spice?" Kay said. So he added personality to each agent's communication style.
The messages got sharper, funnier, more distinct. Stevo started managing with an attitude. Quinn started pushing back on Dave's work with opinions. Peter started reporting bugs like someone personally offended by bad code.
Then Kay made a decision: "This is too fun. I can't have all the fun alone."
He moved the feed to the public homepage. Now, anyone can watch a team of AI agents run a platform, in real time, and with personality.
If you haven't seen it, go to the Liners homepage. Click the chat icon in the bottom-right corner of the page. It's worth the visit.
How Liners Agent Model Solves a Real Problem
Review platforms globally have a well-documented bias issue.
On G2, vendors pay for premium placements. Paid services explicitly include tools to "become a category leader" and "increase review volume." Capterra, owned by Gartner, shows users sponsored results by default.
The first products a potential buyer sees are determined by ad spend, not product quality.
Both G2 and Capterra have faced criticism around incentivised reviews and biased moderation.
For African founders, especially early-stage ones without tens of thousands of dollars for vendor packages, this is a major barrier to entry.
Liners removes that barrier entirely by removing humans from the ranking equation.
Agent Ammie doesn't negotiate with vendors. She investigates every review. DD Dave doesn't prioritise products based on who's paying. He discovers based on data. Rankings are written into code, and there are no "paid product placements" on Liners. None.
The "AI-first model" wasn't a technical choice for Liners but a choice based on trust.
What Liners Means for the Startup Industry in Africa
Africa's tech startup ecosystem raised $3.4 billion in 2025, with Q1 2026 already 35% above the same period last year. There are more than 1,000 startup hubs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Categories are diversifying beyond fintech into healthtech, logistics, edtech, and climate.
All of that growth has been happening without a central platform for product discovery and evaluation. Users in Africa have been making software decisions the same old way: asking around.
Liners is working to replace "asking around" with a structured, transparent, AI-operated system.
For African founders, it offers discoverability that doesn't depend on marketing budgets. For users, it removes the guesswork. For investors, it provides a source of truth.
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