
AI Is Getting Smarter, But Is It Getting Closer to the Ground?
Artificial Intelligence isn’t new anymore. The novelty has worn off. The flashy demos have been seen. The magic tricks are out there for anyone with a prompt and a bit of curiosity. But underneath all the excitement, a bigger question is starting to emerge. One that matters a lot more than whether AI can write poems or generate cat videos.
Can it actually help people make better decisions in the real world?
That’s where things get interesting.
AI, in most of its current form, is still trapped in the abstract. It’s trained on vast amounts of web data, much of it outdated, noisy, or biased. It speaks confidently, even when it’s wrong. And for all the buzz about transformation, most AI still doesn’t have a clear line of sight into what’s actually happening on the ground.
That gap is starting to get noticed.
If the last year was about experimentation, this year is about utility. People are no longer impressed by AI’s ability to mimic intelligence. They want to know if it can help them understand reality, not just simulate it.
That’s where companies like Rwazi are starting to show up in conversations.
Rwazi is doing something surprisingly rare. Instead of pulling data from digital sources, it’s collecting structured insights directly from the field. That means real people reporting real behavior across emerging markets. It’s not scraped, it’s seen. It’s not guessed, it’s verified.
And when AI has access to that kind of grounded information, something changes. It stops spinning narratives and starts offering perspective.
Rwazi has started integrating AI into this process through Ela, a tool built directly into their platform. Ela isn’t a generic chatbot. It’s a layer that helps users make sense of vast amounts of clean, real-world data without needing a team of analysts. You ask a question, and instead of a search result, you get an answer rooted in what’s actually happening across hundreds of markets.
That’s a subtle but meaningful shift. It turns AI from something playful into something practical. And that’s the direction things need to go.
The more AI is tethered to real data, the more valuable it becomes. Not just in marketing or strategy meetings, but in decision-making that affects pricing, inventory, expansion, and how to meet the needs of people on the ground.
Of course, AI still has limitations. It’s not sentient. It doesn’t understand nuance the way humans do. But paired with the right kind of data, it can close the loop between global insight and local reality.
Tools like Ela point to that possibility. They’re not flashy. They’re just useful. And that’s where the future of AI is heading.
Not bigger. Just better.
You can check out how Rwazi is approaching this space at rwazi.com, or dive straight into Ela here: Try Ela.
But more importantly, ask yourself this.
Is your AI grounded? Or is it still floating?