Activities
On stages, in workshops,
in the room.
Where the work goes public: keynotes, panels, and workshops on AI and engineering, and the rooms across China's tech ecosystem most people never see inside.
Showing all 39 activities
AI for Digital Transformation, Panel Speaker
Panel speaker at AI for Digital Transformation, organised by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry with La French Tech and Tencent in Shenzhen. The panel worked through where AI actually lands inside an existing organisation, which is usually not where the strategy deck says it will. Transformation programmes tend to fail at the boundary between a model and the systems of record it has to touch: permissions, data lineage, audit requirements and the human processes that were built around the old constraint. The argument put forward was that the binding limit is rarely model capability. It is whether an organisation can describe its own processes precisely enough for automation to be safe. The audience mixed French, Chinese and international businesses operating in the Greater Bay Area, which made the sovereignty and data residency questions concrete rather than theoretical: several firms in the room operate under obligations in two jurisdictions at once.
Tencent Open Day, Special Invitation
Attended Tencent Open Day in Shenzhen on special invitation, following the OpenClaw hackathon earlier in the year. Open days of this kind are one of the few settings where the gap between how a Chinese technology company describes itself domestically and how it is reported abroad becomes directly observable. The emphasis inside the building tends to fall on deployment and on application rather than on benchmark position, and the questions engineers ask each other are about latency, cost per call and integration surface rather than about model rankings. Access of this kind is the practical value of being based in Shenzhen rather than writing about it from elsewhere. Reading the room in Mandarin, hearing which internal problems people volunteer without prompting, is a different source of signal from any press release.
Second Place, Tencent OpenClaw Global AI Hackathon
Second place at the Tencent OpenClaw global AI hackathon in Shenzhen, competing against teams drawn from one of the densest concentrations of AI engineering talent anywhere. The build connected a consumer messaging interface to a physical robot arm, so that an instruction sent as an ordinary chat message became actuation in the room. That framing matters more than the demo did: the hard part of embodied agents is rarely the model, it is the layer where a probabilistic output has to become a safe, bounded command to hardware that can hurt someone. Getting that boundary right under hackathon time pressure meant deciding early what the agent was never allowed to do, and enforcing it below the model rather than asking the model to behave. The presentation and the judging were in Mandarin. Competing technically in a second language changes what you can say under pressure, and it is a reasonable proxy for whether you are actually inside an ecosystem or observing it from outside.
International Youth Sustainable Innovation Summit (YSS2025)
Keynote speaker on “AI for Sustainable Innovation”.
AIxAfrica 2025: Keynote Speaker, Empowering the Next Generation of Tech Innovators
Keynote speaker at AIxAfrica 2025 on October 18th, addressing the next generation of African tech innovators on how to harness AI as a real competitive tool, not a spectator sport.
KYSHI Bridge Executive Breakfast: Connecting China and Africa Business Leaders
An executive breakfast hosted by KYSHI Bridge, bringing together business leaders operating between China and Africa. The conversations in this room are the practical version of a corridor that usually gets discussed in macro terms. Payments and settlement, which remain the most persistent friction for African businesses buying from Chinese suppliers. Quality assurance and who carries the risk when a shipment does not match the sample. Finding counterparties who will still answer the phone in the second year of a relationship. Trade between the two regions is dominated by intermediaries whose incentives are not aligned with either end of the transaction, which is a structural problem rather than a moral one. Rooms like this are where the alternative gets built, slowly, through people who can operate credibly on both sides.
Documentary on China-Africa Technology Transfer, Shenzhen
Filmed on location in Shenzhen for a documentary on technology transfer between China and Africa, speaking as an engineer who has worked inside the ecosystem here for eight years. The through-line was the part the trade statistics miss. What actually crosses this corridor is more specific than containers and headline numbers: handsets and the software defaults that ship on them, network equipment and the engineers trained on one vendor console, open model weights and the fine-tunes built on top of them, payment rails and their incompatibilities, component sourcing relationships, and people moving in both directions. We shot across the parts of the city where that transfer is visible rather than theoretical: the electronics markets, the manufacturing base, and the developer community that sits between the two. My contribution was the view from inside, where it needed to be, on what the relationship looks like at the level of a working engineer rather than a communique.
IBNS: AI for Efficiency in Enterprise, Participant
Participant at an IBNS session on AI for efficiency in enterprise. Efficiency is the word under which most enterprise AI gets funded, and it is usually left undefined. The discussion that matters is whether a deployment removes work or relocates it, because a system that halves the time to produce a draft while doubling the time spent reviewing output has not improved anything measurable. Review load is the cost that rarely appears in the business case. The more durable framing is not headcount. It is cycle time, error rate and how much institutional knowledge a process needs in order to run, since that last one determines whether a company can absorb someone leaving.
Weekend Cowork in Shenzhen
A weekend spent working alongside friends in Shenzhen. Side projects, unfinished ideas and the kind of unstructured problem solving that does not fit into a working week. Sessions like this are how a lot of the city actually operates. Shenzhen runs on informal proximity: a component question answered by someone at the next table, an introduction that saves a fortnight, a half-built prototype that finds its use case because somebody else looked at it. None of it is programmed, and very little of it would survive being made formal. Also a reminder that sustained technical work is a social activity more often than the mythology admits.
IBNS and Guangdong Chamber of Commerce Art Appreciation, Invited Guest
Invited guest at an art appreciation event hosted by IBNS together with the Guangdong Chamber of Commerce, bringing together international business figures and members of the local chamber. Events framed around culture rather than commerce do a specific kind of work in Guangdong. Relationships that later carry a supplier introduction, a joint venture conversation or a hiring referral are usually formed in rooms like this one rather than across a negotiating table. For anyone operating between African and Chinese business networks, the ability to move naturally in both settings is a practical asset, not a social one. Worth noting for anyone building a business presence in the Greater Bay Area: chamber membership and the invitations that follow from it open doors that cold outreach does not.
OPC-AI Workshop, Invited Guest
Invited guest at the OPC-AI workshop in Shenzhen, on the meeting point between industrial interoperability standards and machine learning on the factory floor. Open platform communications is the vocabulary industrial equipment already speaks. The interesting question is what happens when a model is placed on the other side of that interface: what a unified address space gives you for free when assembling a training set, what it does not give you about data quality, and how much of a manufacturing AI project turns out to be schema and semantics rather than modelling. The practical thread through the session was that plants rarely fail to adopt AI because the models are inadequate. They fail because the telemetry is inconsistent between lines, timestamps disagree across systems, and nobody owns the contract that would make the two comparable.
From Prompt to Action: Engineering Agentic AI Systems for Real World Deployment
A workshop on the distance between an agent that answers and an agent that does work, and on what has to be engineered to cross it. The session covered the harness rather than the model: tool interfaces designed so a wrong call is structurally impossible rather than merely discouraged, retry and backoff behaviour that does not amplify a fault across a fleet, human checkpoints placed where a mistake would be expensive, and observability that records why an agent chose an action rather than only what it did. Failure modes got as much time as capabilities, because the ones that matter in deployment are quiet: a loop that silently truncates its own context, a tool that returns success on a partial write, an agent that retries a non-idempotent operation. The closing argument was about write access. Read-only agents are a different risk class entirely, and most teams should ship several of those before giving anything permission to change state in a production system.
OpenClaw Practical Evolution Theory Master Class
A master class on the practical evolution theory behind OpenClaw, held in Shenzhen the day before the Tencent OpenClaw hackathon. The session worked through how an agent framework evolves a solution rather than executing a fixed plan: how candidate actions are generated, how they are scored against the environment, and where the loop stops being search and starts being engineering. The material sat closer to systems design than to prompt writing. Most of the time went on the unglamorous parts of an agent harness, which is where the failure modes live: tool definitions precise enough that the model cannot misread them, state carried between steps without silently growing, checkpoints where a human decides whether the run continues, and what a sensible budget looks like before a loop is allowed to run unattended. Useful preparation for the competition the following day, and a clear picture of how the Chinese agent tooling community frames these problems in Mandarin, which is not always how the same problems are framed in English-language writing on agents.
Tencent QClaw: Invited to In-House Release & Early Access Testing
Among a select group of external practitioners invited inside Tencent for the in-house release and hands-on testing of QClaw (Tencent’s WeChat-native AI agent platform built on OpenClaw) before its public launch.
OpenClaw Developer Meetup: Hosted by Kimi, Sponsored by AMD
Attended as an invited guest at an OpenClaw developer meetup hosted by Kimi (Moonshot AI) and sponsored by AMD, bringing together practitioners building on the OpenClaw ecosystem in China.
Afritech Intelligence Product Roundtable: Shipping AI to Production
Invited as an expert guest to Afritech Intelligence’s Product Roundtable, a one-hour session with builders, PMs, and founders across Africa on the realities of shipping AI products from prototype to production.
Shenzhen OpenClaw Meetup: Live Robotics Demo with PicoClaw
Demonstrated a live working integration of PicoClaw and a custom-built cobot arm at a Shenzhen OpenClaw community meetup, showing how a $10 edge AI agent can receive natural language commands from WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, and DingTalk to control physical hardware in real time.
Startup Grind Shenzhen: Change Management for AI Adoption in Large Organisations
Participated in a Startup Grind Shenzhen session on one of the most underrated challenges in enterprise AI: not the technology, but the human and organisational change required to make it actually stick.
Intercognitive Workshop: Making the Physical World Accessible to AI
Invited guest at an Intercognitive workshop exploring how AI systems can interact with and act upon the physical world, covering robotics, IoT, and the infrastructure connecting intelligent software to real hardware.
BAFLA Bay Area Tea Talk Shenzhen: Building Software Products in China
Invited guest at a BAFLA Bay Area Tea Talk in Shenzhen, sharing firsthand experience navigating China’s software and mobile app development ecosystem: what it takes to build, ship, and scale products from inside one of the world’s most competitive tech markets.
Aspen Core Global CEO Summit: Special Invitee
Specially invited to participate in the Aspen Core Global CEO Summit in Shenzhen, joining senior executives and global leaders for high-level conversations at the intersection of technology, business, and global strategy.
IBNS Keynote: AI for Entrepreneurship
Delivered a keynote address at IBNS on November 22nd on AI for Entrepreneurship, making the case for how founders and builders can practically harness AI as a competitive advantage, not just a talking point.
2025 National Games of China: Special Honorary Invitee
One of a handpicked selection of foreign talents granted a special honorary invitation to attend the 2025 National Games of China, a landmark national occasion presided over by the President of China.
China Black Business Summit: AI for African Community Development
Invited guest at the China Black Business Summit, sharing insights on how AI can be a practical lever for African community development, bridging China’s technology frontier with Africa’s most pressing growth opportunities.
2025 International Talents Entrepreneurship Forum: Speaker
Speaker at the 2025 International Talents Entrepreneurship Forum in Shenzhen on October 31st, a government-affiliated gathering hosted by the Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Returnees Association, bringing together international talent and entrepreneurs operating in China.
Way2AGI Hackathon: Invited Technical Observer, Shenzhen
Invited as a guest for observation and technical input at the Way2AGI Hackathon in Shenzhen, contributing practitioner-level perspective to teams pushing the boundaries of applied AGI development.
AI Shift Webinar: Innovating with AI for Brands and Creatives
Speaker at the AI Shift online webinar, addressing how brands and creative professionals can move beyond AI curiosity into genuine innovation, building systems that scale and stay relevant in a rapidly shifting landscape.
International Youth Sustainable Innovation Summit: Panelist, AI for Sustainability
Specially invited panelist at the International Youth Sustainable Innovation Summit, contributing expert perspective on how AI can be directed as a meaningful force for sustainability, across infrastructure, industry, and emerging markets.
Club France International: Induction into the French International Expat Community
Inducted into Club France Shenzhen (the French international expat community in Shenzhen), joining a network of professionals connecting French culture, business, and innovation with China’s technology ecosystem.
Internations Shenzhen: Keynote Speaker, The Role of AI & Machine Learning in Digital Transformation
Keynote speaker at an Internations Shenzhen event on the role of AI and Machine Learning in Digital Transformation, addressing one of the most practically important questions facing international professionals and organisations operating in China and beyond.
AI Agent Practical Entrepreneurship Bootcamp: Special Invited Guest
Specially invited to share professional perspective on real-world AI agent adoption in enterprise at an AI Agent Practical Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, contributing frontline experience to a room of entrepreneurs and builders ready to move from theory to deployment.
Spotlight Group Shenzhen: Special Invitee, AI for Marketing & Content Creation
Specially invited by Spotlight Group Shenzhen to share insider knowledge on the most effective AI tools used in China for marketing and content creation, giving creators and marketers direct access to a productivity toolkit most of the world has never heard of.
Six Bridges AI & Stey, Speaker, AI Awareness: Unlocking Business Productivity with AI Agents
Speaker at the Six Bridges AI and Stey AI Awareness session on July 12 in Shenzhen, a bilingual English and Chinese programme unlocking how businesses can harness AI agents to drive real productivity gains.
La French Tech Shenzhen: Mixer Gathering, Ping An Tower
Attended La French Tech Shenzhen’s mixer gathering at Ping An Tower, a lifestyle networking event bringing together entrepreneurs, innovators, and international professionals in one of Shenzhen’s most iconic venues.
Starlight Group Shenzhen: Workshop Facilitator, Introduction to LLMs
Facilitated an Introduction to LLMs workshop for Starlight Group Shenzhen, leading a purely technical audience through the mechanics, architecture, and practical application of Large Language Models.
IEEE Nigeria Southeast Subsection: Keynote Speaker, Generative AI for Real-World Engineering Challenges
Keynote speaker at an IEEE Nigeria Southeast Subsection online webinar on Generative AI for Solving Real-World Engineering Challenges, bringing a Shenzhen-based practitioner’s perspective to one of Nigeria’s most prestigious engineering audiences.
BAFLA Bay Area Tea Talk, Speaker, AI Agents: Bridging Intelligence and Impact
Speaker at the BAFLA Bay Area Tea Talk on March 14, 2025, making the case for how AI agents move beyond technical capability into real-world impact, and what that shift means for entrepreneurs, builders, and communities at the intersection of Bay Area and China tech.
SZDIY Hacker Community: AI Agent Technology Breakdown, Shenzhen
Invited as a member of SZDIY (Shenzhen’s premier hacker and maker community) to share professional perspective on the future of AI agents within Shenzhen’s rapidly evolving technology ecosystem.
Tech in the Tropics: Keynote Speaker, Introduction to LLMs and AI Agents
Keynote speaker at the inaugural first edition of Tech in the Tropics, introducing LLMs and AI agents to an audience at the frontier of tropical and emerging market tech communities.
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Impact projects
Where technology met community
Volunteer and community initiatives with real outcomes, documented like everything else on this site.
Presenting technical work in a second language changes the preparation
Second place at Tencent's OpenClaw hackathon in Shenzhen, pitched and defended in Mandarin. What changes about preparation, and what reading Chinese sources first-hand actually buys.
Mentoring at the Global Youth AI Hackathon
Mentored young builders at the Tencent-organised Global Youth AI Hackathon in Shenzhen, working on scoping, harness design and the difference between a demo and a system.
How to Start a Tech Community in a City Where You Are Foreign
The mechanics nobody writes down: why first meetings fail as coordination problems, why narrow definitions travel further than broad ones and what the Greater Bay Area gives an African engineer.
Volunteer Organisation Succession Planning Starts With a Membership Record
Volunteer bodies decay when the rules live in one person's head. The order that prevents it: membership record and constitution first, programmes last, with a gate between every step.
Teaching Scratch Programming to Secondary School Kids in Nigeria
A volunteer-led initiative that introduced Scratch programming to secondary school students in Lagos, Nigeria, empowering young minds with foundational coding skills and building a generation of future-ready digital creators."
Student Engagement Rate: 72% increase
Press
Media coverage
Press page- THISDAY Okafor: Nigerian Tech Leader Building Stronger Community in China
- Digital Times Nigeria From Shenzhen to the World: Francis Okafor and the Making of a New Nigeria-China Bridge
- Nigeria CommunicationsWeek Francis Okafor Stuns China, Emerges Second-Place Winner @ Tencent OpenClaw Hackathon
- TechEconomy Nigerian Francis Okafor Wins Second Place at Tencent OpenClaw Hackathon in China
- IT Pulse Beyond borders: Nigerian engineer claims silver at Tencent’s 2026 Global AI Hackathon
- Digital Times Nigeria Francis Okafor Stuns China, Emerges Second-Place Winner At Tencent OpenClaw Hackathon
- IT Pulse Meet Francis Okafor, A Prominent African Voice In China’s Tech Ecosystem
- Nigeria CommunicationsWeek Nigerian, Francis Okafor, Gains Prominence in China’s Tech Ecosystem
- TechEconomy Meet Francis Okafor, Nigerian Engineer, Building AI in the Heart of China’s Silicon Valley
- Diaspora Digital Media Meet Francis Okafor, Nigerian Engineer Building AI in China’s Silicon Valley
- Digital Times Nigeria Meet Francis Okafor, The Nigerian Tech Leader Redefining Africa’s Place In China’s Innovation Ecosystem
I speak about agentic AI systems, embodied intelligence, LLMs in production, and building technical communities.
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