<p>Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming societies, economies, and knowledge systems worldwide. In the field of inclusive innovation, AI has the potential to promote equity by addressing long-standing inequalities and exclusion in work and knowledge production. However, as AI becomes embedded in labour processes and capitalist production models, it risks reinforcing historical patterns of marginalisation and diminishing indigenous ways of knowing. The automation of work and the preference for data-driven expertise may further displace community-based, experiential, and oral forms of African knowledge, thereby intensifying epistemic and structural inequalities. This article explores how the transformation of work and knowledge systems by AI intersects with Africa’s colonial legacies of exclusion. Drawing on African epistemologies, it examines concepts such as Ubuntu, which emphasises community and interdependence as a response to the individualism and extractivism embedded in AI systems. It also references folklore, such as the tokoloshe, as a metaphor for the unseen disruptions and ethical challenges that AI introduces. Collectively, these frameworks demonstrate how AI’s integration into labour and knowledge sectors may both challenge and threaten indigenous knowledge systems, while also highlighting Afrocentric pathways for more inclusive and humane technological futures. Clinical trial number: Not applicable.</p>