How AI-powered Plotweaver seeks to unlock Africa’s £100B+ creative potential

Africa’s creator economy was valued at $3.08 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $17.84 billion by 2030. The reason is not far-fetched; African content offers a global audience a unique window into the continent’s diverse cultures, traditions, and stories.

The continent has a unique history of arts, crafts and music orientation. Creators have learned to tell compelling stories using a combination of music, fashion, dance and film-making.

Analysts agree that the continent’s movie industry has the resources to significantly boost Africa’s economy. Nigeria is Africa’s number one movie production industry, closely followed by South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Ghana, Tanzania, Egypt, Mozambique, and Namibia.

South Africa is one of the most cinematically prolific countries in Africa and, indeed, the world. Nigeria’s Nollywood is the world’s second-largest film industry after India and ahead of the United States, Japan, and China.

However, the opportunities are not devoid of unique challenges. Closely following the problem of low-quality productions and a deeply fragmented layer of players is the question of efficiency.

Largely owing to the lack of the requisite tools, the present content creation process is broken: story development is scattered across multiple tools and platforms, and resource management remains error-prone.

Filmmakers are using multiple disconnected tools and wasting nearly 40% of their time on administrative tasks rather than creative work. More critically, they struggled to translate their creative visions into investment-ready content that could secure major funding.

In turn, these inefficiencies lead to increased production expenses. But, behind the scenes, a team of young, innovative Africans led by Oluwole Fagbohun, a machine learning engineer, has been building an end-to-end platform for creative workflow management that will help players to leverage untapped opportunities within the cultural and creative industries.

Plotweaver is an AI-powered software that enables seamless script development, story analysis, consistent checking, workflow management and efficiency metrics.

I spoke with Oluwole to understand his motivation, his team’s unique advantages and how they aim to transform how stories are developed, funded, and delivered across emerging markets with a special focus on unlocking Africa’s £100B+ creative economy potential.

"What drove me was seeing how fragmented workflows and inefficient processes prevented amazing African stories from reaching global audiences at scale."

For passion and tech

Oluwole describes his tech journey as defined by a passion for creativity and innovation.

“I started in AI/ML engineering and gradually became fascinated with how technology could transform creative industries”, he explained. However, the real catalyst for PlotWeaver came from his love of films and seeing the untapped potential in Nollywood.

“As a film enthusiast, I could see the gaps in the quality of films we make in Nollywood. The incredible talent and creativity were there, but the infrastructure and tools to fully realise that potential weren’t”, he added.

Meeting Ojo Johnson (COO), who brings 20+ years of film/TV production experience and Ifeanyi Kalu (CCO), an award-winning actor and director, transformed his passion into action. “They gave me deeper insights into the scale of the problem from an insider perspective”, Oluwole said.

Through countless conversations with filmmakers, producers, and writers, the founders began to understand that what was needed wasn’t just another tool, but a robust end-to-end solution that could address the three critical challenges facing African filmmakers: quality, funding, and distribution.

This understanding led to building PlotWeaver not just as a software platform but as a comprehensive operating system for Africa’s creative economy.

Plotweaver is powering creativity with AI

PlotWeaver is built with a “creative-first” philosophy that puts user experience at the centre of its design process.

“We’ve incorporated extensive user testing with filmmakers at various skill levels, observing their workflows and pain points to build intuitive interfaces that feel natural to creative professionals”, he explained.

To ease adoption, the team developed a modular approach where users can start with just the features they need and gradually expand as they become comfortable. This prevents the overwhelming feeling that comes with complex tools like some Adobe products.

They also built contextual AI assistance directly into the platform to guide users, suggest the next steps, and offer real-time help without requiring them to leave their creative flow.

Before the arrival of simplified tools like Capcut, video editing was considered one of the most technical aspects of content creation and was often reserved for specialists, who are nightmares for other creatives.

Not only has Plotweaver simplified the end-to-end process for creators. Like the popular design platform, Canva, it also provides templates, presets, and automated workflows that reduce the cognitive load and boost creative freedom.

The most fascinating discovery, for Oluwole and his team, has been the profound impact of cultural context on AI storytelling capabilities.

“When we began training our Orisa Itan model with Nigerian English and local languages, we saw dramatic improvements not just in linguistic accuracy but in narrative structure, character development, and thematic resonance. What surprised us was how global models often misinterpreted cultural nuances that are essential to authentic African storytelling”, explained.

He recalls that concepts like extended family structures, traditional authority dynamics, or spiritual elements that are central to many African narratives were consistently misunderstood by existing AI systems.

“This discovery reinforced our belief that truly empowering African storytellers requires technology built with these cultural contexts embedded at the core, not merely adapted as an afterthought. It’s also shown us that there’s a much deeper opportunity here – to create AI systems that preserve and amplify cultural knowledge rather than homogenising it.”

The team that powers the vision

The Plotweaver team structure reflects its mission to bridge technology and creative industries across multiple cultural contexts. Oluwole explains that the diversity of the team, spanning technical expertise, creative experience, and market knowledge, is deliberate:

“Our executive team represents this intersection, with my background in AI/ML complemented by Ojo Johnson (COO) who brings 20+ years of film/TV production experience, Ifeanyi Kalu (CCO) who is an award-winning actor and director, and Marilha Naccari who leads our South American strategy with her 22+ years in the Brazilian film industry”, he explains.

To deepen its presence, the team also embraced a distributed team in the United Kingdom (where we’re registered) and key market hubs in Lagos, São Paulo, and soon in other African nations. “This allows us to maintain close connections to the creative communities we serve while leveraging global expertise”, he explained.

The CEO added that gender diversity is a priority. It boasts a strong female representation across our technical, creative, and business development teams.

This ensures that the end product reflects creative perspectives that all all-inclusive. “We believe this diversity strengthens our ability to understand and serve a wide range of storytellers”, he explained.

Staying relevant

Oluwole admits that maintaining relevance and competitive advantage involves several approaches. He lists deliberate strategies that the team has put in place to inoculate the startup from sudden disruption in the future.

"First, we're building deep market-specific expertise that would be difficult for global giants to replicate quickly. Our understanding of emerging market production workflows, cultural contexts, and regional filmmaking ecosystems creates a moat that generic AI tools can't easily cross.

Second, we're establishing ourselves as essential infrastructure through institutional partnerships with film corporations, guilds, academic institutions, and production companies. These relationships create an ecosystem that's more resilient to outside disruption.

Third, we're focused on specialised workflows rather than competing on general AI capabilities alone. While tech giants may build better general-purpose AI models, our value lies in how we apply AI to specific production challenges and workflows in underserved markets. 

Fourth, our business model emphasises network effects – as more creators, production companies, and financial institutions join our ecosystem, the platform becomes more valuable to all participants, creating a defensible position even against larger competitors.

Finally, we maintain optionality in our strategic direction. We're building PlotWeaver to succeed independently, but we're also open to partnerships, integrations, or even acquisition by larger players if that would better serve our mission of empowering global storytellers.

The key is that we’re not just building features – we’re building a community and infrastructure for emerging market storytelling that addresses fundamental needs beyond what technology alone can provide.”