By Sirrah Touray
Bloom Bank on Tuesday convened senior finance executives, regulators, and industry leaders for a breakfast forum on “AI for Finance Professionals,” urging The Gambia’s financial sector to adopt artificial intelligence to drive efficiency, strategy and innovation.
Managing Director Alfred Amoah opened the session with a personal story that he said motivated the Bank to host the event. He told participants that his 8- year old son used AI tools to research his salary after Amoah told him he could not afford a PlayStation.
“He came back two hours later and said, ‘Daddy, you lied. I know your minimum salary as MD,’” Amoah said.
“I realised if our kids can do financial control with AI, why aren’t we using it in finance?” Amoah said the experience led him to take an AI course, where he discovered a colleague could complete a 10-day task in 10 minutes. “In this environment, innovation is no longer an option. It’s a strategic imperative,” he said.
Salifu Bah, Director of Finance in Petroleum at Bloom Bank, said AI is transforming the profession but will not replace finance professionals. “AI replaces tasks, not people. The tasks being automated were never the source of our profession, they were the price of our admission,” Bah said.
He outlined the sector’s evolution from handwritten ledgers to ERPs and spreadsheets, and now to AI powered systems that can read invoices, post entries, and write management narratives in seconds. “Your value is no longer producing the report. Your value is in what happens after the report the insights, the judgment, the courage to tell leadership what the numbers reveal,” he said.
“If AI generates a wrong report, regulators come to finance, not IT. We must be part of that governance process,” he said. He argued that the CFO’s role has shifted from “guardian of the past” to “chief strategic partner.”
Workshop trainer Olamide Jalaoso conducted a practical session on using AI tools across job functions. He demonstrated research, executive communications, and content creation, stressing that better prompts produce better outputs. “AI is the mirror of your instructional clarity. Precision leads to excellence,” Jalaoso said. He shared examples of using AI for car-buying research, writing emails, and designing flyers, noting that tasks that once took days can now be done in minutes. “AI isn’t taking your job. But someone using AI might,” he told participants.
The forum noted that AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT are already in use in Gambian offices, and institutions must adapt or risk falling behind. As Bah put it, “Go from this room not asking, ‘Will AI replace me?’ Ask, ‘How do I become the strategic partner my organisation cannot afford to be without?’” For Bloom Bank the future of finance in The Gambia will belong to professionals who embrace AI to create value, not just record it.
