With more than 2000 spoken languages, Africa's linguistic diversity is second only to Asia. A third of the world's languages is spoken by the 1.2 billion people living within her 54 countries. But the language of artificial intelligence is yet to gain fluency. It has become hackneyed to weave AI into every conversation about technology and society. AI will take away jobs.

Internet technology giant Google has officially opened its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Centre in Ghana with high hopes of finding solutions to Africa's problems. Artificial intelligence is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. It helps find solutions to real-world problems. It can help people focus on what is relevant and open up new ways to solve problems in almost every imaginable field such as AI helping pathologists to spot cancer cells on slides, advising farmers on how to address problems with their crops and helping manufacturers detect equipment breakdowns. Google is optimistic the lab in the West African country – the first in Africa – will transform lives by coming up with bespoke solutions for the continent's problems including natural disasters.

As data breaches, misuse of personal information and the spread of disinformation erode the public's trust in Silicon Valley, it can be all too easy to become cynical about technology's impact on the world. But there are still plenty of reasons to be optimistic about tech's role in society moving forward. Below, TIME speaks to 10 innovators, founders, investors and even athletes who remain upbeat about technology's influence despite the many challenges facing the industry today. Moustapha Cisse left Senegal a decade ago to study artificial intelligence, and now he believes the technology can change Africa for the better. Cisse, 34, is leading Google's AI research center in Accra, Ghana, the company's first such venture in Africa. "I built my team here around people who are really committed to make a difference in people's lives," Cisse tells TIME. "[They] bring a fresh perspective in the field by looking at the problems that we have in Africa." Growing up, no one would have expected Cisse to be heading up a multi-billion dollar corporation's research initiative.

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Tangier, Morocco, Charity Wayua laughs as she recounts her journey to the city for a conference on technology and innovation. After starting her trip in Nairobi, Kenya, where she leads one of IBM's two research centers in Africa, she had to fly past her destination for a layover in Dubai, double back to Casablanca, and then take a three-and-a-half-hour drive to Tangier. What would have been a seven- to eight-hour direct flight was instead a nearly 24-hour odyssey. This is not unusual, she says. The hassle of traveling within the region isn't the only thing making things difficult for Africa's research community: the difficulty of traveling out of the region has often left its researchers out of the international conversation.

AI can be applied in sectors such as agriculture, health, and education, and Moustapha Cisse, the research scientist heading up Google's AI efforts in Africa, says his team's goal is to provide developers with the necessary research needed to build products that can solve problems that Africa faces today. "Most of what we do in our research centers at Google and not just in Accra, we publish it and open-source code, so that everybody can use it to build all sorts of things," he said. Cisse mentioned the app used by the Tanzanian farmer, to diagnose her cassava's disease as an example of the type of product his team plans to collaborate on with relevant institutes across various sectors. "A team of Pennsylvania University and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture using TensorFlow to build new artificial intelligence models that are deployed on phones to diagnose crop disease. "This wasn't done by us but by people who use the tools we built.

In seconds she gets a diagnosis of the disease affecting her plant and how best to manage it to boost her production. The farmer used an app on her phone based on TensorFlow, Google's Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine that the company opensourced to help developers create solutions to real-world problems. When people think of Artificial Intelligence, they most likely think of scenes from science fiction movies, but in reality, it applies to everyday life from virtual assistants to language translation on Google, says John Quinn, an AI researcher. Google now wants to position itself as an "AI first" company and with research centers across the globe in places such as Tokyo, Zurich, New York, and Paris. And last week, the technology company opened its first center in Africa in Ghana's capital city, Accra.

This year, we have seen an acceleration of Silicon Valley tech giants opening AI research labs around the world as they seek to gain traction among researchers and fulfill their global ambitions. In the past six months or so, Google brought labs to China and France, Facebook opened labs in Pittsburgh and Seattle, and Microsoft announced plans to open labs near universities in Berkeley, California and Melbourne, Australia. This trend shows no signs of slowing down. Last month, Samsung announced labs in Cambridge, Moscow, and Toronto. This week, Nvidia announced plans to open a new lab in Toronto, while Google shared plans to open a lab in Accra, Ghana, Google's first in Africa and perhaps the first of any tech giant in Africa.