Business leaders and marketing experts at MTN Ghana’s 2026 Digital Transformation Conference in Accra warned on Wednesday that companies chasing technology without building trust and maintaining genuine human connection risk undermining the very customer relationships they seek to strengthen through digital tools.
The conference, held on May 13 under the theme “Pioneering the Future and Embracing Digital Transformation for Marketing Excellence,” drew more than 500 professionals from Ghana’s marketing, banking and technology sectors. While much of the day focused on artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and platform innovation, two speakers drew consistent applause by arguing that the race to digitise was creating blind spots around what consumers in Ghana most fundamentally value.
Ama Amoah, National Vice-President of the Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghana (CIMG), said businesses fixated on speed and automation were missing the point. She acknowledged the transformative power of AI and data analytics but argued that technology without relational trust would fail to convert digital reach into lasting commercial value. She noted that while digital platforms had strengthened brand visibility, they had also amplified concerns about data privacy, fraud and the erosion of human customer service. She warned that as automation scales, the human reassurance customers need when things go wrong must not be engineered out of the experience. She stressed that responsible data usage, clear communication and accessible human support were not optional features but foundational requirements for building durable brand trust in Ghana’s market.
Andrew Ackah, Chief Executive Officer of Dentsu Ghana, delivered the keynote address on the theme “Digital Transformation within the Customer Marketing Space: Adapt Faster, Connect Deeper,” reinforcing Amoah’s argument from a strategic perspective. He said businesses must resist the temptation to reduce customers to data profiles, however sophisticated the analytics behind those profiles might be. Every data point, he stressed, corresponds to a real person with unchanged emotional needs, and the brands that would win in a consumer-led digital era would be those capable of responding intelligently and meaningfully to those needs in real time. He described the shift away from “digital presence” toward what he called “digital excellence” as the defining competitive challenge for Ghanaian businesses, and warned that adaptation alone without deepened customer trust would not be sufficient for long-term survival.
Adding a data governance dimension to the theme, Joshua Chijioke, Business Development Manager for Chenosis at MTN, cautioned that poor data quality was already undermining many businesses’ digital campaigns by directing promotional content at inactive users or reassigned phone numbers. “Data is the foundation of success in the era of artificial intelligence,” he said, arguing that no AI tool or automation system could compensate for a weak or poorly maintained customer database.
Together the three perspectives offered a corrective to the conference’s dominant optimism about digital adoption, signalling that the next phase of Ghana’s digital marketing evolution would be shaped less by which businesses adopt technology earliest and more by which organisations use it most responsibly and with greatest attention to the human beings at the centre of every transaction.
