Michael Odokara-Okigbo is a technologist, founder, and systems builder focused on developing infrastructure for African language intelligence. As the Founder and CEO of NKENNE and NKENNEAi, he is leading the creation of one of the first tonally and dialectally sensitive AI translation systems designed specifically for African languages.

His work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, linguistics, and scalable software systems. Under his leadership, NKENNEAi has developed a multilingual AI translation API supporting Text-to-Text (TTT), Speech-to-Text (STT), and Text-to-Speech (TTS) capabilities, built on proprietary datasets collected through structured, high-quality pipelines across multiple African countries. The platform emphasizes continuous data refresh, rich metadata, and linguistic accuracy to address the unique challenges of tonal and low-resource languages.

Michael has secured multiple National Science Foundation (NSF) SBIR awards (Phase I and Phase II) to advance this work, positioning NKENNEAi as a critical layer of language access infrastructure for enterprises, governments, and digital platforms. His technical roadmap focuses on scalable model deployment, dataset licensing, and integration into global AI ecosystems.

Beyond product development, Michael is actively shaping the broader AI landscape through partnerships and policy engagement. He has worked with government bodies such as Nigeria’s NITDA to build national language AI infrastructure and serves on a state-level AI task force in the United States. His approach combines deep technical execution with a long-term vision of making African languages fully accessible in the digital economy.

With a background in mobile development, AI systems design, and platform architecture, Michael continues to push NKENNEAi toward becoming the foundational infrastructure powering African language intelligence worldwide.