From a virtual courtroom for law students to digital tools for small businesses, Ade-Ibijola has built his career around making artificial intelligence useful beyond the laboratory.
When law students at the University of Johannesburg put on virtual-reality headsets in July 2024, they entered a courtroom where they could practise legal arguments and confront situations they might otherwise encounter only after graduation.
The VR Courtroom was developed jointly by the university’s Faculty of Law and Johannesburg Business School. Professor Abejide “Jide” Ade-Ibijola served as its lead technical developer, combining virtual reality, artificial intelligence and game-based learning to turn legal theory into something students could experience.
“It’s not just about learning law; it’s about experiencing it,” he said when the platform was launched.
Four months later, the project was named Africa Tech Innovation of the Year by Business Tech Africa. The award offered a useful glimpse into what distinguishes Ade-Ibijola’s career: he is an academic computer scientist, but much of his work begins with practical problems rather than technology for its own sake.
From Keffi to Johannesburg
Born in Ekiti State, Ade-Ibijola studied theoretical and applied computer science at Nasarawa State University, Keffi. He graduated with first-class honours in 2007 and was the university’s overall best graduating student.
He later obtained a master’s degree in computer science from the Federal University of Technology, Akure, earning a distinction for his research. He completed a PhD in computer science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2016, specialising in artificial intelligence and the use of machines to analyse and understand computer programs.
Ade-Ibijola is now Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Applications at the Johannesburg Business School, University of Johannesburg. He also founded the university’s Research Group on Data, Artificial Intelligence and Innovations for Digital Transformation.
His formal research interests include algorithm design, synthetic-data generation, serious games, program analysis and theoretical computing. Outside computer-science departments, those subjects can sound remote. Ade-Ibijola’s work, however, often turns them into tools for students, entrepreneurs, banks and public institutions.
Making AI Useful
One example is BizAssistBot, an artificial-intelligence assistant developed to help business students understand how small companies operate. It allows users to explore questions involving sales, inventory, marketing and financial management through simulated business situations.
Another project, Street-Cred, examines whether AI can help assess the credibility of small businesses using indicators linked to their operations and growth. His research group has also worked on AI-assisted career guidance, automated academic assessment and tools intended to reduce the language barriers facing African students.
This interest in accessible technology runs through his teaching. In 2019, Ade-Ibijola and a colleague received the University of Johannesburg’s Innovation of the Year award for Learn As You Earn, a platform designed to connect students with commercial opportunities through their mobile phones. A year later, he received the university’s award for teaching excellence.
His promotion to full professor was formally marked by the university in April 2024. He titled his inaugural lecture Mind, Heart, Grenade: A Story of a Career of Innovation—an unconventional title that reflected his argument that technology must be matched by human purpose, discipline and a willingness to challenge established methods.
Building African Technology Talent
Ade-Ibijola’s work is not confined to the university. In 2016, he established GRIT Lab Africa, a non-profit initiative providing young Africans with free training in programming, artificial intelligence, web and mobile development, virtual reality and entrepreneurship.
The programme combines technical instruction with mentorship and career preparation. Its stated objective is not simply to produce more programmers, but to help participants develop the confidence and persistence required to build products, find employment and solve problems within their communities.
That emphasis matters in a continent where enthusiasm about artificial intelligence often runs ahead of access to computing infrastructure, reliable data and advanced technical training. Ade-Ibijola’s response has been to work on smaller, more immediate gaps: helping students learn in familiar languages, giving entrepreneurs better analytical tools and allowing universities to experiment with technologies that would otherwise be expensive to procure.
Not every university prototype becomes a widely used commercial product, and some of the impact figures published in academic biographies are difficult to verify independently. The stronger evidence of Ade-Ibijola’s influence lies in the range of institutions that have adopted or recognised his work, his publication record and his ability to bring together students from computing, business, education and law.
For Ade-Ibijola, Africa’s place in the AI economy will not be secured by consuming tools developed elsewhere. It will depend on Africans acquiring the skills to adapt the technology to their own institutions, languages and economic realities.
His career trajectory from a first-class computer-science degree in Keffi to a professorship in Johannesburg shows what that approach can produce: research that does not end with a paper, but is tested in classrooms, businesses and public institutions.
