Andela CEO on AI, Talent and the Future of Software Development in Africa
The global talent marketplace is shifting its core business from placement to reskilling, as artificial intelligence rewrites the job description of the software developer.
Andela, the global remote technology talent marketplace, has set an ambitious target to train 15,000 AI-fluent developers by the end of 2026, a move its chief executive describes as a direct response to a deepening skills crisis in enterprise AI deployment.
Carol Chang, CEO of Andela, revealed this at the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi back in February, where she outlined the company’s pivot from a hiring marketplace to a training and reskilling partner for global enterprises.
“The half-life of technical skills is shrinking,” Chang told the Africa Tech Summit podcast, hosted by TechTrends Media’s Nixon Kanali. “What we have to do is recognise that the skills we require of senior developers, the humans overseeing AI systems, need to evolve at the speed that the models are developing.”
Founded in Lagos in 2014 on the premise that brilliance exists everywhere but opportunity does not, Andela built its reputation placing junior African developers into remote roles with global technology companies. That model is now evolving.
Chang says the core competency of the software developer has fundamentally changed. Where engineers were once measured on the quality of handwritten code, they are now expected to orchestrate and supervise large language models, integrate AI-generated outputs into existing enterprise codebases, and exercise systems thinking and critical judgement.
“LLMs are very good at writing code,” she said. “The job of the developer now is to sit on top of the LLM, to orchestrate it, to supervise it, and to oversee agentic systems.”
Andela’s 2026 reskilling curriculum spans Kubernetes, GitHub Copilot, RAG pipeline construction, LLM evaluation, and model deployment, skills it has packaged into what Chang described as a playbook developed over a year of pilot programmes in 2025.
The Forward-Deployed Engineer
Central to Andela’s strategy is a bet on the rise of what the industry is calling the “forward deployed engineer” a term coined by Palantir, describing highly skilled technologists who can not only deploy AI systems but also interface directly with enterprise clients and understand their business context.
“This is what is needed in the age of AI,” Chang said. “To have an engineer who knows how to do all of those things well was typically regarded as a unicorn. The severe shortage of these engineers is going to become only a bigger issue.”
Chang argued that the greatest bottleneck to enterprise AI adoption is not the technology itself but the absence of human infrastructure to deploy it safely and at scale. Many companies, she noted, have completed proof-of-concept pilots but stall when attempting broader rollouts, a gap Andela is positioning itself to fill.
“We see a lot of companies that have done pilots and are excited by them. But when it comes to deploying at scale, this is where things stall and often fail.”
Woven Acquisition and GitHub Partnership
To sharpen its assessment capabilities in an era when AI can itself write code, Andela acquired technical assessment platform Woven, completing the first phase of integration in January. The acquisition is intended to automate the evaluation of deeper architectural and systems thinking skills that AI cannot replicate.
The company has also entered a partnership with GitHub to train developers on GitHub Copilot, which Chang described as the most widely deployed coding assistant in enterprise environments.
Looking further ahead, Chang said Andela’s vision is a personalised, AI-powered learning and assessment system that continuously evaluates developers against emerging skill requirements, replacing traditional instructor-led training models with an automated coaching loop.
With a network spanning over 135 countries and roots in African developer communities, Andela sees the continent as central to closing what industry forecasts project as a global talent shortage of 85 million technology workers by 2030, a gap with an estimated revenue impact of $8.5 trillion.
“Software development is a job that still can be done very well remotely,” Chang said. “That part of Andela’s business model has not changed.”
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