AI Where the Network Isn't: Cloud Native Patterns for Low-Connectivity AI

Most AI and cloud reference architectures quietly assume a smartphone and reliable broadband. But for community health workers, field agents, and last-mile users across much of Africa, that assumption breaks down.

This session explores how event-driven design, serverless orchestration, and managed AI services can bring inference to basic USSD and SMS interfaces, serving users with feature phones and patchy connectivity.

We will walk through a complete reference architecture—covering gateways, event buses, orchestration, inference, and response flows—while examining the hard tradeoffs around latency, cost, and observability that come with low-bandwidth environments. Cloud native isn't just about scaling to millions of app users; it's how you make AI reach the people technology usually leaves behind.