There is a question worth asking carefully as Ghana moves into the implementation phase of the 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development Programme: who will run it, and with what cognitive equipment?

Not the policy direction, which is now approved. Not the political will, which is evident. I mean the practical, daily intelligence required to keep three productive shifts moving in a country that has, until now, run mostly on one. Who schedules the shifts? Who anticipates the equipment failure at 2 a.m. before it disrupts a production run? Who clears the cargo manifest that arrived overnight at Tema? Who prepares the EU compliance documentation so a consignment of cocoa derivatives leaves on Tuesday rather than Friday? Who informs a cooperative in Sefwi what their beans are worth this week in Hamburg?

These are the operational questions that will determine whether the 24-Hour Economy becomes a transformational policy or simply an extended-hours policy. The difference between the two outcomes is not effort — Ghanaians are not short of effort. The difference is intelligence capability, in the precise sense of the word: the capacity to make accurate, timely decisions at the speed and volume that round-the-clock production demands.

This is where artificial intelligence enters the conversation and where the National AI Strategy and the 24-Hour Economy Programme begin to look like one project rather than two.

Ghana now has two ambitious frameworks on the table. The National AI Strategy commits the country to building intelligence capability. The 24-Hour Economy and Accelerated Export Development Programme commit the country to building productive capacity. Each is impressive on its own. Together, they are considerably more powerful and considerably more demanding of the workforce we have yet to build.

The 24-Hour Economy is, at its operational core, an intelligence economy in working clothes. Every additional hour of national production multiplies the volume of decisions that must be made about scheduling, energy, safety, quality, logistics, customs clearance, pricing, market access, and customer service. Human teams, however well-staffed, alone cannot make those decisions at the speed three-shift production requires. Some portion of the cognitive load must be absorbed by intelligent systems. Those systems, in turn, must be directed by trained Ghanaian professionals who know how to use them. That direction, the deliberate, structured guidance of AI tools toward useful, verifiable outputs, is the discipline of prompt engineering. This connection between the two strategies is the case I would like to make.

Part of the difficulty in advancing this conversation in Ghana is that prompt engineering is often described, even in serious policy circles, as typing questions into ChatGPT. That description understates the discipline considerably and makes it harder to plan for, budget for, or train at the scale the country requires.