How Jesutomiwa Salam built a career around solving hard problems with AI
Jesutomiwa Salam went from teaching himself to code to building AI systems used by insurers across Africa and the Middle East.
When Jesutomiwa Salam says he builds things that make other things work, he is simply summarising a journey that began more than a decade ago.
Today, Salam is an Engineering Lead who builds artificial intelligence systems used by insurers across Africa and the Middle East. But his story starts from a place of uncertainty, something many Nigerian tech talents will recognise.
“When I finished secondary school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The only thing I knew was that I loved mathematics and physics, but I did not like the practical aspects of them. I didn’t like having to connect wires or build systems or integrations,” he tells Techpoint Africa.
Yet somehow, he found his way to solving complex problems.
In his search for a path, Salam realised, from watching movies, that characters who were good at maths always wrote code, so he decided to try his hand at coding.
He enrolled in a web development class for a short while and later taught himself to code through books and online videos.
This is a learning pattern that mirrors the journey of many early Nigerian tech talents. Sometimes they start with a brief class at a semi-formal computer school and then spend months, sometimes years, piecing knowledge together from blogs, GitHub, YouTube, and trial-and-error.
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But the landscape is shifting. Remote tech schools like AltSchool are beginning to formalise what used to be a largely self-driven path, giving today’s beginners a more structured starting point than was obtainable years ago.
Solving vague, impactful problems
After completing a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Salam went on to acquire a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Surrey, UK.
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