According to PwC’s Africa Cloud Business Survey for 2025, while only 37% of businesses report that they are actively scaling agent AI implementations, 91% consider agentic AI capability a critical factor when choosing a cloud services provider.

By investing in flexible and scalable infrastructure to enable AI innovation, enterprises in Africa are moving beyond typical chatbots and recognising the broader potential of autonomous agents.

However, with agentic capabilities comes the need for orchestration. As enterprises deploy more agents, their ability to deal with that complexity across IT and business environments will become the measure of long-term success.

Hybrid cloud: A key component of agentic AI

Across West Africa, many companies are still in the early stages of IT modernisation, working to centralise, manage and automate traditional workflows.

Many are only at the start of their AI journeys, but their focus is quickly shifting from deploying simple chat interfaces to high-density, autonomous workflows. The goalposts have not shifted; they have just grown in size and scope.

With that expansion comes growing complexity and risk, and nowhere is that more evident than with agentic AI systems.

Poor design and implementation can lead to AI agents failing, whether it be through bottlenecks, conflicting objectives, resource conflicts or even feedback loops.

The way forward is to take a step back. Infrastructure and implementation are the most challenging aspects of using AI agents, and key to those aspects is enterprises prioritising open hybrid cloud platforms that let agents function consistently across different environments.

A hybrid cloud approach also enables enterprises to move models, workloads and policies whenever and wherever required, contributing to the system agility and scalability that’s critical to innovating with AI.

Implementation requires orchestration

Today, enterprises and industries are building and deploying agents for very specific use cases. An excellent example of this is in financial services, where agentic AI is revolutionising fraud detection and risk management by automating fraud response procedures, optimising and tuning prevention strategies and conducting real-time behavioural risk assessments.

Key to agentic AI in financial services and other industries is not relying on a single, general-purpose AI solution.

Agents need to be designed and deployed for specific tasks, whether those tasks are customer-facing, such as automated billing or personalisation, or at the back end of the business, including data retrieval and analytics. In all cases, agents need to be fit for purpose.

The end result is multi-agent systems (MAS), where agents not only execute their specific workflow but also collaborate with each other to accomplish greater, more complex tasks.

They do this through agent and multi-agent orchestration, a subset of AI orchestration that addresses key functions such as cross-agent communication, role allocation and conflict resolution.

By successfully orchestrating AI agents, enterprises in West Africa can automate complex workflows, unlock operational efficiency and improve the speed of their decision-making.

They can also explore new business models, products, services and market opportunities. Keep in mind, AI agents are meant to augment, not replace human expertise, and so any successful use case is also dependent on orchestrated collaboration between agents and technology teams, complete with full operational visibility and oversight.

A reliable, consistent foundation for AI innovation

As is the case with many elements of enterprise IT, agentic AI faces challenges related to consistency, interoperability and visibility.

Key to addressing those challenges is standardising the tools that developers use to build and manage AI systems, along with platforms that streamline development and enable developers to deploy agents and the applications they empower across different IT environments.

The solution lies with AI-integrated platforms that not only offer key essential IT functions but also come equipped with built-in integrations that let enterprises control their entire AI lifecycles, including building and tuning models, applications and agents.

Open standards and APIs further enable coordination between the tools and vendors that enterprises use, as well as enable them to move applications, agents and their workflows across hybrid environments.

Automation through agentic AI represents a huge chunk of the future of IT transformation and modernisation across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Realising this future starts with laying a reliable and consistent foundation for innovation. With the power of open, hybrid and integrated platforms, enterprises in the region not only optimise their infrastructure and automate complex workflows with the help of agents but also reach a point where they can successfully manage and orchestrate those agents across their entire IT estates.

*Oluwafiropo Tobi Ogundare is the regional sales lead for West Africa and Mauritius at Red Hat 

The post How Enterprises Can Build and Manage AI Agents appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

In Nigeria, millions of dollars are being funnelled into new data centres and next-generation infrastructure to handle advanced computing workloads.

At the same time, leaders are calling for the country to achieve digital sovereignty, prioritising and building the infrastructure, talent and cloud sovereignty that will make it self-reliant.

AI is increasing the demand for cloud capacity, both locally and globally. But with that demand comes the need for enterprises to adhere to residency rules and ensure all their data, applications and operations remain within relevant borders.

To ensure this, enterprises need to understand what cloud sovereignty implies, and with the right approach, they can not only comply with regulations but also lay a solid foundation for their AI strategies and quickly start to scale and draw business value from the technology.

 A model for cloud sovereignty

For many companies, cloud computing is the default for storing, managing and analysing their data and applications.

With that default comes the need for robust frameworks that ensure companies adhere to sovereignty obligations, especially as cloud environments, such as scalable enterprise-grade infrastructure, become critical for hosting AI workloads and applications.

Migrating to the cloud is a priority for companies, but it does involve ceding a degree of independence and operational control to hyperscalers and service providers. Additionally, companies may face risks related to data privacy and third-party access, all of which can immediately impact migration efforts or long-term innovation projects.

According to a recent Red Hat survey, sovereignty concerns are the biggest barrier to cloud adoption for large EMEA enterprises.

This creates the need for sovereign architectures, which enable organisations to maintain transparency over core IT services, including networking, automation and key management. Sovereign controls encompass data encryption, access and identity management (AIM), audit management, supply chain security, and workload and data residency protections.

All of these and other controls allow West African organisations to control who can access their data and systems, as well as make decisions regarding the physical and geographical locations of their infrastructure.

Balancing innovation with compliance

Digital and cloud sovereignty are important factors when it comes to companies’ AI plans and projects, especially as the technology becomes more integrated into core business functions.

According to Red Hat, companies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa plan to increase their AI investments by an average of 32% by 2026.

Innovation cannot come at the expense of compliance, nor should compliance be a barrier to innovation. Companies in Nigeria and West Africa need governed environments where development and operations teams can access the tools and resources they need for AI projects.

The solution for this is an open source approach, which guarantees transparency and openness and enables companies to innovate and build applications and solutions with confidence.

Using enterprise open source platforms, companies can control, manage and move their data and AI workloads across different clouds and environments based on sovereign and residency requirements.

This results in a high level of flexibility and operational resilience, which are core components of any AI strategy, especially as enterprises worldwide turn their attention to agentic AI and deploy agents that run on multiple models and feature higher degrees of computational complexity.

Agentic AI holds a lot of potential for the continent, with sectors such as healthcare, financial services, education and government services. And ensuring the sovereignty of an organisation’s digital infrastructure is the first step to building systems and agents that deliver real business value.

Choosing the right partners and platforms

When it comes to addressing digital sovereignty, West African enterprises need to prioritise partners and vendors who don’t just understand the regulations, but who can help them adhere to those regulations while modernising their technology at the same time.

When it comes to choosing a sovereign partner or provider, enterprises should prioritise those with national certifications, local data centre ownership and no vendor lock-in.

As for platforms, enterprises should prioritise those that offer them the flexibility of hybrid cloud and that provide them with the control, trust and resilience they need in a sovereign environment, as well as embrace AI to its full potential.

By taking that route, and with the help of trusted and industry-recognised vendors, West Africa can become an example for the continent in not only achieving digital sovereignty but also building an ecosystem that accelerates innovation.

The post Why Digital Sovereignty is Now Central to Africa’s Enterprise AI Strategy appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Service providers are responding to the growing demand, including MTN Nigeria and the company’s multi-phased launch of a US$235 million data centre.

The move to the cloud carries many implications for software developers and IT teams. Chief among them are those related to cloud-native development – building applications and programs designed for a cloud computing architecture.

Going cloud-native is the right call for many businesses, especially in industries like financial services that rely on IT platforms to deliver faster and more efficient banking solutions to customers.

That said, this decision needs to be coupled with the right development approach, one that supports the full scope of innovation that financial service providers (FSPs) have in store.

The importance of flexibility and choice

The pace of modern technology, and especially the ongoing impact of artificial intelligence (AI), demand that banks and institutions achieve economies of scale in the cloud. It is the only way to guarantee growth and capability.

However, relying on a single major cloud vendor can introduce risks. Companies can face negative circumstances such as a decline in the quality of service, unwanted changes in product offerings, and price increases that upset IT expenditures.

Dependency on a single vendor’s environment also poses a risk to the development of new business applications.

When a business builds a new app on a specific public cloud, those applications can become specific to that environment, creating portability concerns for developers.

By natively developing and hosting an application in one environment and using its specific language and tools, developers can create a dependency that limits application portability and scalability.

Best practices can help organisations maintain flexibility, such as assessing apps before migrating and scrutinising data and workflow dependencies.

The way forward lies with the fundamentals. FSPs need to consider how they build apps, and specifically on what platforms, to retain choice and control.

A new approach to development

Cloud application development offers FSPs many benefits. In a 2024 cloud adoption in Africa survey by McKinsey, all respondents felt confident that their organisations would expand their cloud presence over the next one to three years. Respondents from financial services predicted the highest rate of increase in public- and private-cloud growth on average.

Cloud app development offers improved performance as computations take place on the server side, as well as increased uptime, scalability, security, and streamlined updates via large-scale deployment. However, developing in the cloud requires businesses to adopt and adhere to practices across all IT arenas, including SecOps and DevOps practices, and new virtualisation technologies.

This includes implementing containerization, where developers package software with all its essential components and dependencies.

With the ability to share the host machine’s operating system kernel, containers negate the need for individual operating systems.

This allows applications to run consistently on any infrastructure while developers can work in them using the same toolsets.

By supporting continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, FSPs and their development teams can deliver apps more quickly and efficiently.

The best kind of banking

Consumers prefer a banking experience that is simple, streamlined, and intuitive. West Africa’s financial sector and their developers need the same from their technology. Part of modernising IT infrastructure to support cloud-native applications is investing in hybrid cloud solutions that serve as a foundation for building and scaling them.

A solution like Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform offers developers a consistent experience across different environments while enabling them to deploy and manage applications using their existing tools and frameworks.

A flexible foundation also helps FSPs in Nigeria prepare for the adoption of AI. Development teams need platforms built to handle intelligent applications.

At the same time, they can optimise time and resources spent throughout the app lifecycle.

This is critical as conversations surrounding AI, in both financial services and other industries, are starting to move away from training models and towards using them to generate business value.

Moving to and working in the cloud demand a change in mindset by institutions and developers.

By collaborating closely with trusted partners and knowing what foundation to lay, banks and FSPs in Nigeria can make their investments go further and maintain the freedom to innovate for the future.

The post Banking for Change: How Nigeria’s Financial Providers Should Approach Cloud Development appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Cloud adoption across the continent compares favourably to those in other regions, with one McKinsey survey showing that the majority of companies have already deployed cloud technology to multiple or all business units.

That all said, moving to the cloud is not always a straightforward task. On-premise, monolithic applications can be difficult to update for architectural reasons, are not easily adaptable to meet new customer and company needs, and cannot integrate with third-party systems, thus preventing lucrative business partnerships.

Keep in mind, not every application can live in the public cloud for a variety of reasons. But when it comes to modernising, West African businesses need to know what is best for their applications and the approach they take to their modernisation journey.

One size doesn’t fit all

Application modernisation does not happen all at once. Though it’s commonly accepted now to be essential for business success, IT leaders may opt to first implement small-scale projects before progressing all the way to continuous modernisation.

Taking an incremental approach enables teams to overcome connected challenges and become familiar with new tools and development methodologies.

Application modernisation is also not a monolithic process (unlike many of the applications in question). Organisations will use a variety of strategies relative to the application they’re looking to migrate.

According to the Red Hat State of Application Modernisation report, 85% of applications from surveyed organisations will be modernised using two or three steps.

Those steps include:

• Rehost: Moving applications to the cloud with minimal change (also known as “lift and shift”).
• Replatform: Optimising applications to run in a cloud environment without changing their code or architecture.
• Refactor: Reconfiguring applications to be cloud-native, whether by containerising workloads or moving them to a serverless architecture.

In short, businesses’ modernisation strategies need to align with the needs of each workload, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

When NOT to migrate

Modernising applications does not just entail picking them up and placing them in the public cloud. Case in point, lift and shift may offer benefits such as a quick and easy migration, it is mostly an option for workloads that are “cloud-ready” to some extent, like those built on microservices architecture.

But even before businesses reach the point of formulating their migration plans, they need to be aware of instances where it’s preferable to keep applications on-premise.

For example, legacy applications may be highly entangled with one another or tuned with specific databases and platforms for performance and reliability purposes.

Companies wary of escalating cloud costs may also prefer to keep their data on-premise, or that data may be subject to very strict security considerations. Finally, there may be a question of distance.

Applications that rely on real-time user data interaction or gather data from local IoT devices are better left on-premise along with their database, as moving to a public cloud environment may impact data transfer times.

Culture, process, and technology

When it comes to application modernisation, the ingredient for success is for enterprises to take a holistic approach that combines application platforms and technologies with the greater culture and operations of the organisations.

IT is no longer just limited to a single department or team, and people no longer just sit at the periphery. Employees across the organisation need to come together and collaborate on newfound business objectives.

They do this using standardised and agreed-upon processes and best practices, and help identify and adapt the applications that will deliver the most value.

Lastly, the most mission-critical part of any modernisation effort is the underlying platforms that enable enterprises to build, run, and manage their applications.

Enterprises need to prioritise platforms that support multiple generations of applications while giving them the necessary flexibility and interoperability for guaranteed performance and efficiency.

With the help of vendors and trusted technology partners, enterprises across West Africa can implement a cloud and modernisation strategy that best meets the needs of their organisations. It all starts with a little strategic thinking.

The post Getting Your Business’ Applications into the Cloud Isn’t Always Easy, But it can be Streamlined and Strategic appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Case in point, earlier this year, Nigeria’s government announced it is working to reach 70% digitalisation by 2025 through public-private partnerships, not only enhancing its digital capabilities but also fostering innovation and national economic growth.

Effective business digitalisation is only possible when enterprises have people who can speak the language of both business and technology, and who have the resources and knowledge to lead change throughout the entire organisation. For an enterprise to be profitable, scalable, and relevant in the future, its human resources must be able to operate like one interconnected stream.

With the right approach to culture and IT service delivery, an emphasis on cultivating talent, and leveraging technologies such as automation, enterprises in West Africa can make that a reality.

Business accelerated

IT and applications playing such a critical role in business today. Enterprises need to be able to go from development to deployment as smoothly and efficiently as possible, not to mention giving teams the ability to oversee and maintain IT environments without overburdening them.

This is where the DevOps approach yields so much value on top of delivering value to the end user.

DevOps implies that development and operations teams combine forces to collaborate and overall optimise the production environment, automating routine tasks and speeding up workload processes.

Teams become more agile with regard to software, but also gain a more holistic perspective on the integration of services and how they work together.

Not every organisation may have separate development and operations teams, but DevOps represents an overhaul of an organisation’s entire culture.

It means sharing information and taking responsibility for shared decision-making. The result is a greater level of interconnectedness, with teams working together to service the organisation as a whole.

An in-house centre of excellence

In the face of a shortage of essential IT and digital skills, many companies across West Africa take matters into their own hands by operating their own training and upskilling initiatives. By doing so, they retain capacity and control over the quality of the skills that they have access to.

One organisation I know of has even gone so far as to create its own automation centre of excellence (CoE), consolidating resources from all business units to identify where the organisation can implement automation to increase performance, productivity, and efficiency.

By creating a pool of knowledge that informs their automation journey, combined with automation platforms that allow for enterprise-wide adoption, companies have the means to fully realise their automation ambitions.

CoEs not only help fill explicit skills gaps, but also move organisations to a higher level of IT maturity. For example, a CoE could assist organisations in adopting a hybrid cloud architecture, combining environments so that the organisation can access the resources they need.

Automation brings the enterprise together

A trap that many businesses fall into with their digital transformation plans is relying heavily on fragmented, single-use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools, resulting in workflows becoming unnecessarily complicated and infrastructure becoming more complex, all while running the risk of incompatibility.

Businesses can avoid this with a unified foundation that facilitates all IT processes while giving them the opportunity to expand new digitalisation initiatives across the whole organisation. For example, using an automation platform, businesses can create, deploy, and share automation content at scale.

It also enables them to centralise and control their IT infrastructure while eliminating the potential for deployment to be inoperable.

This is enterprise IT being a force for interconnectivity and collaboration in West African enterprises. By leveraging the right platforms and aligning their approach with business automation, companies can get the most out of new technologies.

The post IT is Not Just a Department – How DevOps and Interconnectivity Help W/African Enterprises Evolve appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Automation is on everyone’s minds. Following in global footsteps, Nigerian enterprises are seeing the value of deploying new technologies across their IT infrastructure.

Gartner predicts that in 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services, up from 20% in 2020.

As IT takes on a prominent role in the operations of any business, automation platforms can help streamline activities and improve productivity levels, consistency, and overall business performance.

But, when it comes to automation, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. The technology holds incredible potential for Nigerian organisations if applied to IT infrastructure, but it requires a measured and strategic approach. One that unlocks maximum value and transforms infrastructure based on the size, needs, and expectations of the enterprise.

Infrastructure automation at base level

The automation trend comes as enterprise IT systems and infrastructure grow in size and complexity. IT spending in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) region is predicted to reach $99.9 billion in 2023, thanks to a year-on-year growth rate of 4.3%. This implies organisations in the region need to strengthen their digital resiliency and better position themselves for new market environments.

Enterprises don’t just need to invest in solutions that can transform them into digital-first organisations. They need solutions that allow them to scale quickly and efficiently, and that will help them fulfil daily responsibilities and complete workflow processes.

Essentially, infrastructure automation aims to reduce the amount of human input necessary to deliver information and technology services. Several IT infrastructure processes can be automated, including configuration and system maintenance that enables organisations to manage infrastructure without having to increase the size of their teams.

Automation platforms available to organisations come with all the tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, including playbooks, visual dashboards, event-driven solutions, and analytics. These are the fundamental building blocks of infrastructure automation and what enterprises need to get started.

The benefits and challenges

By automating IT tasks – system configuration, software deployments, and workflow orchestration – Nigerian enterprises can unlock several benefits.

For one, automation can help reduce costs. Enterprises save money by operating more efficiently, making fewer errors, and not having to increase the size of their IT departments. It is also a win for productivity. Teams no longer have to worry about manual tasks, meaning they can focus on more important business development projects, and retain availability in the event of downtime or any unforeseen incidents. Automation offers improved governance. Regardless of administrative oversight or input on any particular day, automated tasks adhere to stipulated corporate governance and data compliance rules.

On the flip side, automating IT tasks can be a challenge, especially when organisations try to expedite or rush the deployment process. IT teams may feel pressured to integrate new and legacy systems without accounting for complexity or interoperability. Taking a step back, organisations may be willing to cede too much control of their operations to software. This can result in increased expenditure, lack of clarity when it comes to long-term business goals, and teams feeling overloaded. Organisations must have a clear idea of what they want to achieve with the latest IT technologies, and that starts with devising a strategy.

Setting realistic goals

A good rule of thumb when devising your automation strategy is to let mechanical, repetitive work guide your priorities. In other words, automate tasks that frustrate team members or draw their attention away from more important ones. The approach to automation should align with the greater business goals and include outcomes that demonstrate value for individuals and teams, separate from the financial value for the organisation.

From there, organisations can take several steps to promote effective, enterprise-wide automation adoption. They include:

• Deploying a unified platform that works consistently across teams, processes, and IT environments. A user-friendly platform ensures easy adoption and eliminates the need for extensive training.
• Creating a cross-organisational automation team. Sharing best practices and experiences across the enterprise helps make adoption more seamless.
• Sharing automation content. By sharing content via a centralised repository, enterprises can increase consistency and efficiency between departments.
• Integrating domain-specific tools into your automation platform means there’s no need for teams to stop using the tools they already have.
• Tracking automation metrics. Key performance indicators (KPIs) help you track your automation journey.
• Applying clear standards and systems of governance. This includes defining guidelines for assets and their use, standardising testing, review, and release processes, and maintaining access controls for security purposes.

Above all else, enterprises need to manage expectations and set realistic goals. Automation may be a leading business priority, but it is only as effective as its deployment and strategy.

Nigerian enterprises should not underestimate the work that goes into automating their IT infrastructure. But, with the help of platform vendors and a well-conceived strategy, they can leverage the power of automation to generate authentic and uncompromised value for their business.

The post Garbage in, Garbage out: Infrastructure Automation and the Importance of Well-paced Deployment for Nigerian Businesses appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

As of June 2023, enterprises in Nigeria have less than a year to plan and execute their migration paths from CentOS Linux 7.

Updates for the open source project will end on 30 June, 2024 as it reaches its end of life. The project comprises two Linux variants: CentOS Linux, a platform built for a wide variety of deployments; and CentOS Stream, a delivered distribution that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) development and is positioned as a midstream between Fedora Linux and RHEL.

This may seem daunting for businesses that rely on CentOS Linux 7 as the foundation for their enterprise IT infrastructure. End-of-life cycles present a challenge for organisations as they require planning and preparation. But it doesn’t have to mean the end of the world, not when enterprises can leverage the power of open source.

The journey of CentOS and life cycles

As the preferred Linux distribution in the hosting industry for many years, CentOS offered enterprises several advantages. The most notable being multiple built-in security features such as Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux).

As an access control mechanism that enforces rules based on pre-defined policies, SELinux helps reduce vulnerabilities that threat actors may exploit. CentOS also offers extended support. Major versions are supported for 10 years, and because of that, applications that run on it do not need to be updated as often.

What makes CentOS 7 and its life cycle so relevant is it coinciding with Nigeria’s overall digital transformation journey and the growth of the information, communications, and technology sector. In 2020, the sector contributed 15% to GDP, continuing a trend seen over the previous five years where the sector grew at a rate of 18% between 2016 and 2019.

Today, every industry sees the value of investing in IT infrastructure and making IT a core component of business, which in turn dictates investments in software, platforms, and digital products.

This digital ecosystem needs to be powered by something, and many enterprises are looking for something that offers maximum flexibility, scalability, and cost effectiveness.

For many businesses in Nigeria, CentOS offered all those benefits. But in the face of CentOS 7 Linux going end-of-life, many people I’ve encountered are now wondering what the next steps are. And let me be clear, a commitment to open source is still the direction to take.

Default to open source

CentOS has long been a definitive example of why organisations should adopt a “default to open source” mentality, using open source solutions to fulfil business needs, especially in the face of growing hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Typically, open source solutions are more cost effective than proprietary ones. They allow organisations to start small and expand based on their business requirements, and they enable them to work quickly, starting with a community version to solve a business problem and achieving value almost immediately.

Open source has a solid security track record, especially when it comes to commercial distributions. Developers and vendors who have spent years working on the platform are ideally placed to identify vulnerabilities and then roll out updates. Compare this to a proprietary environment, where few may be aware of said vulnerabilities.

As we see today in mobile solutions with Android, it is highly likely future system architectures will be based on open source, and powered by cloud computing services, microservices, and containerisation. That means the platforms, wherever they’re obtained, are a positive long-term investment.

As more enterprises use enterprise IT, the approach they take now will determine where new technologies will take them in the future.

Migrating with ease

Organisations can obtain software from community-based (unpaid) distributions or vendor-based, paid, commercial-grade ones that offer maintenance and additional support services.

Enterprises may be tempted by the idea of going it alone and saving a bit of money in the short term. But paid solutions can bring efficiencies that achieve higher value over the long term, as well as maximise overall costs compared to unpaid solutions.

For enterprises that cannot complete their planned migrations before June 30, 2024, there are solutions. For example, for organisations running RHEL 7, Red Hat offers a four-year Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) maintenance period, which gives organisations some breathing room and an opportunity to finish formulating their long-term infrastructure strategy. Those who are still running CentOS Linux are encouraged to migrate to RHEL. Because CentOS Linux was derived from RHEL sources, users can continue to use many of the techniques and elements they’re familiar with.

Migrating away from CentOS Linux is not a process Nigerian enterprises need to fear. Instead, they should view it as the next chapter of their enterprise IT journey.

By working with open source vendors and collaborators, they can turn the page seamlessly and ready themselves for the future.

The post CentOS Linux is Coming to an End: What Does that Mean for Nigerian Businesses? appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.