The hidden cost of fragmented work
A modern team can have more software and less clarity at the same time. One decision is made in a meeting, another appears in a chat, a deadline changes in a spreadsheet and the reason behind it remains in one person's memory. Each tool may work. The system between them does not.
This fragmentation is especially expensive for growing businesses. Founders become the default search engine. Managers spend meetings requesting updates that already exist somewhere. New employees learn through oral history. When a key person leaves, part of the organisation's memory leaves too.
Lana is Unovia's AI-powered workspace management platform, built to help teams connect plans, tasks, decisions and context. Public coverage has described Lana as Africa's first AI-powered workspace management platform. The meaningful test of that positioning is not the label. It is whether the product helps work move with less uncertainty.
A productive workspace does more than store activity. It explains what matters next.
A large digital base, used incompletely
IFC's 2024 study of African business digitalisation found that 86% of firms have access to basic digital tools. More than half of firms with at least five workers have internet-connected computers, rising to 80% among medium and large firms. Digital payments are already a strong entry point: 62% of firms using advanced digital technologies use them for payments.
The gap appears in depth of use. Fewer than one in three adopting firms use digital technologies intensively for business. IFC calls this “incomplete digitalisation.” It matters because advanced and intensive digital use is strongly associated with productivity and can explain as much as 30% of productivity differences between firms, even after controlling for size, sector and location.
A workspace product should help close this gap by making digital work coherent, not by adding another isolated destination. Lana's design question is therefore: can AI reduce the effort required to organise, retrieve and act on the information a team already creates?
From task management to organisational context
Traditional task software answers useful but narrow questions: who owns this, and when is it due? An intelligent workspace should connect those answers to the decisions, documents and dependencies around the work. A team should be able to understand why a priority changed, what remains blocked and which commitments are at risk.
Lana's product direction includes a shared view of projects and responsibilities, AI-assisted summaries, clearer follow-up and retrieval of relevant knowledge. The purpose of summarisation is not to produce more text. It is to help a manager or teammate enter a situation quickly enough to make a sound decision.
This also changes meetings. When status can be assembled from the work itself, meeting time can be used for choices, trade-offs and creative problem-solving. When actions are captured with owners and context, the value of the conversation survives after everyone leaves the room.
Designed for the economics of African firms
The addressable need is significant. IFC estimates that 600,000 formal firms and 40 million microbusinesses could benefit from digital upgrades. It identifies up to $2.7 billion in opportunity around business digital transformation. At the same time, African businesses can pay up to 35% more for comparable technology, while infrastructure, finance and digital skills remain barriers.
Those conditions should shape Lana. A workspace platform for the region must work well on common devices, avoid unnecessary data consumption and provide value before a company has completed a complex migration. It should respect that many teams coordinate through messaging and spreadsheets because those tools are flexible and familiar.
The goal is not to punish existing habits. It is to give them a stronger system of record. Adoption will depend on whether Lana can fit into the rhythm of work, then gradually make that rhythm clearer.
AI introduces responsibility
A workspace can contain commercially sensitive plans, performance discussions and personal information. AI features therefore require clear permissions, careful retention and the ability to see where an answer came from. A confident summary with no traceable basis can create more risk than a missing one.
Managers should also resist turning visibility into surveillance. Lana should help teams coordinate outcomes, not measure people through shallow activity counts. Productivity is not the number of messages sent or tasks touched. A responsible system preserves space for judgement, deep work and the different ways people contribute.
How the product should be judged
Lana should earn adoption through outcomes that a team can feel and measure: less time searching for information, fewer missed commitments, faster onboarding, shorter status meetings and clearer ownership. Retention matters too. If users return only because management requires them to, the product has not become useful enough.
Africa's firms already have digital access at meaningful scale. The next opportunity is to help them use technology more intensively and intelligently. Lana is being built for that transition: from scattered activity to shared context, and from storing work to helping the organisation remember itself.