I spoke at the Business & Leadership Expo on a question more marketers in need to be asking: are we building “AI-driven marketing” customers can actually trust, or just marketing that happens to be compliant?
Botswana’s Data Protection Act, 2024 has been in force since last year. Most rooms I talk to already have the “modern marketing stack” running: ChatGPT, Mailchimp, Canva, AI ad targeting (Meta), maybe a chatbot, without anyone asking where that data goes, who else can see it, or whether the tool was built with any of this in mind.
My argument: Compliance is the floor. Trust is the ceiling. Most businesses are still arguing about the floor while their competitors are already building on the ceiling.
I walked through five checks any marketer can run this week before scaling any AI tool: purpose first, consent as UX, minimise and localise, explainability, human in the loop. None of it needs a legal degree. It needs actually asking the questions most of us skip.
I also borrowed a lens from a colleague, Themba “The Deaf Designer” Moyo, whose research on this same Act found something sharper than a checklist: five vulnerabilities it’s actually protecting people against: access, knowledge, capacity, dependency, uncertainty. Worth sitting with, whatever business you’re in.
Thank you to the chief organiser, Mokgethi Ramolelekwane, for the platform, and to everyone who stayed for questions afterwards. If any of this made you wonder what’s actually happening in your own marketing stack, that was the whole point.
