The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) is moving to clear a mountain of delays with the help of Artificial Intelligence. The Registrar-General, Hussaini Ishaq Magaji, SAN, announced in Kano on Monday that an AI agent will soon be deployed to wipe out a backlog of 7,000 company registration applications.
According to him, the new system will manage compliance, registry, and customer service tasks with speed and accuracy.
“In a bid to tackle the backlog of 7,000 registration applications… an AI agent was in the pipeline to handle requests across compliance, registry, and customer service with speed and accuracy,” the Commission said.
Bumpy Transition to AI Portal
Magaji admitted that the shift to the AI-driven portal has been rough. Applicants have faced long delays in approvals, especially for services not included in the first phase.
He explained that the system has been stretched thin, processing thousands of requests daily.
He said the commission had inherited an overstretched registration portal that was unable to cope with the growing demands triggered by compliance initiatives such as mandatory registration of Point-of-Sale (PoS) businesses and annual returns filing.
According to him, the situation created a backlog of applications and placed an unfair burden on customers and staff.
“Our call centre and operational departments receive no fewer than 3,000 emails daily, with less than 100 staff attending to them.
“This model is not sustainable and not fair to our customers or our staff. That is why we resolved to change it for good,” he said.
The AI tool under development will be able to read and understand them within a minute, remove duplicates, and forward issues to the right departments. “Problems have been identified, and solutions are already in motion,” Magaji assured.
The Road So Far
The CAC launched its AI-powered portal in June to modernise Nigeria’s business climate. It was designed to simplify company registration, provide instant name approvals, and suggest alternatives if preferred names were taken.
Magaji compared the new process to opening an email account. But glitches have frustrated many Nigerians. Payments sometimes fail to reflect, documents refuse to upload, and transactions stall midway, leaving users stranded.
Still, despite setbacks, CAC reported in July that the platform was already handling more than 11,000 transactions daily. This as proof of Nigeria’s gradual move towards digital governance, though with teething troubles.
AI Comes to the Rescue
He added that the AI system, launched in June, had successfully reduced the time for business name registration to less than 10 minutes, a feat he described as unprecedented globally.
“Anywhere you are, without knowing anyone in CAC or paying a middleman, you can register a business name and get your certificate instantly in less than 10 minutes. That is the new Nigeria we are building,” he said.
He, however, acknowledged that other services, such as limited liability company and incorporated trustee registrations, were still experiencing delays due to backlogs, with about 7,000 pending applications being handled by only 63 registry staff.
The registrar-general assured stakeholders that further phases of the digital reform would address these gaps, stressing that technology was now a necessity for the commission to deliver its mandate.
Also speaking, Ahmed Abubakar, Chairman, Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Ungogo branch, commended the commission for its digital reforms, describing them as a “remarkable achievement.”
Similarly, Usman Umar-Fari, Chairman, NBA Kano branch, urged the CAC to encourage companies to fulfill their corporate social responsibilities and create more opportunities for lawyers.
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