In Lagos, Nigeria's Federal Government and Access Bank convened entrepreneurs, scholars, and technology leaders around a shared conviction: that the fate of a $1 trillion national economy rests not in its largest corporations, but in the 40 million small businesses that already sustain 84 percent of its workforce. Artificial intelligence, they argued, is no longer a luxury of scale — it is the equalizer that can close the distance between a business's first year and its fifth. The gathering was both a diagnosis of fragility and an invitation to transformation, arriving at a moment when policy,