From Grounded Dreams to Global AI Innovation – Exclusive Interview with Prince Adenola Adegbesan

From early challenges in Nigeria and strategic reinvention in the UK to founding InspireEdge AI, Prince Adenola Adegbesan is redefining the future of global business through innovation, leadership, and resilience.

For Prince Adenola Adegbesan, every closed door has been a redirection toward greater impact. Born in Nigeria with dreams of becoming an aeronautical engineer, he transformed early disappointment into a lifelong pursuit of building systems that endure. From leading over 20,000 students as a reform-driven Students Union President to acquiring more than 1,000 acres in real estate, Adegbesan has consistently demonstrated an ability to identify patterns, anticipate disruption, and turn vision into legacy.

His voice as a strategist first reached global audiences through his Amazon all-time bestselling book, The Legal Lifeline of Global Businesses in the Post-Pandemic Era, which has been translated into six languages and continues to guide executives navigating transformation and uncertainty.

Today, as Founder and CEO of InspireCraft Global, he is channeling that experience into the future of commerce with InspireEdge AI and its flagship solution, RecovCart. Already recognized by global institutions, including the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, and with published research downloaded over 2,000 times, Adegbesan has emerged as a thought leader at the intersection of law, business strategy, and artificial intelligence. His mission is clear, to democratize strategic intelligence for businesses worldwide and to ensure that the next generation of leaders can navigate disruption with confidence.

Prince Adenola Adegbesan, Global Business Strategist & AI Innovation Leader

Who is Prince Adenola Adegbesan? Introduce yourself, your hobbies, your favorites, you at home and in business. Tell us something interesting about yourself.

I was born in Nigeria with dreams of becoming an aeronautical engineer. As a boy, I sketched wings, calculated lift, and studied flight as if destiny depended on it. When my father said, “I cannot afford it, son,” I did not abandon ambition, I redirected it. If I could not design aircraft, I would design systems that people relied on, systems that protected value, and systems that moved economies forward.

I threw myself into art and became the best in class. I rose to the head boy of my secondary school, Mabunmi Memorial Grammar School in 2008 in Ijebu Ode. 

Law became my next framework for engineering. I saw contracts, precedent, and governance as systems as rigorous as any aeronautic design. In 2015, I was elected Students Union President of Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, representing more than 20,000 students across six campuses. It was not ceremonial but a test of real leadership. I shifted the culture of the union from spectacle to substance and delivered a tangible legacy, the first fully student-funded relaxation center in the university’s history, a facility still standing today.

To sharpen my lens for strategy, I studied governance and qualified as an associate of the Chartered Governance Institute. This helped me think at the board level and design systems that endure. I went further into finance, completing financial modelling and valuation as well as business intelligence and data analysis, because I wanted to merge financial precision with analytical clarity. I added enterprise design thinking with IBM to discipline myself in customer-centric problem solving, a skill I still apply every day in building AI products.

My corporate grounding included an internship with Hewlett-Packard, where I worked on venture capital evaluation and business strategy. That experience gave me a close look at how innovation is assessed and capitalized at scale.

When I qualified as a lawyer, I made a strategic bet on land. I assembled more than 1,000 acres across Nigeria. Land for me was not speculation but a way to build time, optionality, and intergenerational value. It gave me the freedom to study, to experiment, and to prepare for ventures that would scale beyond any single market cycle.

During that period, I wrote The Legal Lifeline of Global Businesses in the Post-Pandemic Era. What began as a research exercise in resilience became an Amazon all-time bestseller, translated into six languages, and used by executives navigating disruption. For me, its success is less about sales and more about the validation that ideas can be both practical and global.

My curiosity about leadership under pressure pushed me to research how visionaries adapt in crises. My paper Visionaries Under Fire was published on SSRN and has been downloaded more than 2,000 times. That level of engagement matters to me because it shows the work is not just read but applied in boardrooms and classrooms.

I was later invited to join the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, where I benchmark ideas with peers and editors shaping the global management agenda. This role keeps me accountable to clarity of thought and forces me to translate trends into practical strategies.

When I moved to the UK, I studied the SME ecosystem and saw how exposed small businesses were. More than 5,000 had collapsed between 2020 and 2024, while large enterprises had entire teams of analysts optimizing in real time. I knew I could build something that leveled the playing field.

I founded InspireCraft Global and launched InspireEdge AI. I did not want another tool, I wanted a platform for the customer of the future. Our flagship, RecovCart, predicts cart abandonment, personalizes interventions, tracks competitor moves, and converts insight into measurable growth. It gives merchants the same edge as the Fortune 500 without the overhead.

RecovCart is only the beginning. We are building modular systems for automation, decision support, and capital allocation, designed for leaders who demand momentum and durable advantage.

Away from work, I am a pattern-recognition addict. I read across psychology, history, economics, and systems theory. Jim Collins’ Good to Great remains a cornerstone, shaping my belief in disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. I mentor young entrepreneurs because I believe lessons paid for with sleepless nights should shorten the path for others.

Through Envoy Nation, Say Yes Mentoring, Leicester Career Hub, and the Pioneer progressive Humanitarian Forum, I help youth and professionals access digital opportunities. These commitments reflect my conviction that knowledge must cascade and multiply.

Being a Prince in Nigeria has never been about privilege for me, it has been about pressure, responsibility, and the weight of lineage. I learned early that titles mean nothing without value creation and that leadership is proven by people advanced and institutions strengthened.

My ambitions are not private. I want to democratize strategic intelligence so every entrepreneur can compete with the largest players on merit. I want to build products and institutions that change how commerce makes decisions, protect revenues, and allocate capital with intelligence.

My work is measured in tangible engagement, in a book translated into six languages, in more than 2,000 research downloads, in roles where I shape and test ideas with global leaders, and in mentoring, where I see the next generation move faster than I once could.

This is who I am. A maker of systems, a teacher of leaders, a strategist for the customer of the future, a husband and father, and a global voice for innovation and resilience. I do not seek permission to build, I compel it through results, through influence, and through a track record that is global, measurable, and enduring.

What inspired you to become The AI Maverick and specialize in your niche?

I never set out to become “The AI Maverick.” What drove me was frustration, watching small businesses fold because they lacked the kind of intelligence and tools that big corporations take for granted. I grew up in Nigeria dreaming of building systems that moved people and economies forward. That dream started with aircraft design, then shifted to law because I realized governance, contracts, and precedent were another kind of engineering. Each step taught me how to build frameworks that protect value and guide decision-making.

When I moved to the UK and saw thousands of SMEs closing between 2020 and 2024, I knew my systems thinking had to meet technology. Artificial intelligence wasn’t just the next big thing it was the only thing powerful enough to democratize strategic intelligence for entrepreneurs at scale.

Becoming “The AI Maverick” wasn’t a brand exercise, it was a statement of intent. It means refusing to build AI as a buzzword or a black box, and instead designing it as a transparent, practical partner that helps leaders recover lost revenue, anticipate disruption, and make smarter decisions in real time. My niche AI for SME survival and growth came from seeing an underserved market, but it’s also my way of honoring my original dream, creating systems that lift people, protect value, and make economies more resilient.

What core problem do you solve for your clients that they struggle with most?

The biggest struggle my clients face isn’t lack of ambition, it’s lack of visibility. Most small and medium-sized businesses operate in the dark, they can feel something leaking in their revenue flow, but they can’t see where it’s happening or how to stop it.

Their tools give them fragments, a marketing dashboard here, a CRM alert there, maybe an abandoned cart report, but nothing that connects those dots into a story they can act on. As a result, they make reactive decisions, lose customers silently, and waste money fixing the wrong problems. That blind spot is what kills momentum faster than competition ever could.

I built InspireEdge AI to solve that. Our flagship system, RecovCart, gives businesses real-time clarity, not just data, but intelligence. We identify where revenue is leaking, predict why it’s happening, and prescribe the fastest route to recover it. Whether it’s cart abandonment, competitor pricing shifts, or customer disengagement, we help leaders see it early and act before it becomes a loss.

Here’s how we do it. We track behavioral signals from cursor movements and page exits to sentiment and social interactions and translate those signals into actions that recover or retain customers. Then we layer it with real-time competitive data, customer value scoring, and automated recommendations that tell leaders, “Here’s what’s happening, here’s why, and here’s what to do next.”

It’s like giving every business a small but elite strategy team, one that never sleeps, never guesses, and always learns. We integrate seamlessly with existing tools like Shopify, WooCommerce, and WhatsApp Business Cloud, so teams don’t have to change how they work, they just get smarter while doing it.

At the core, I solve uncertainty. I replace reaction with foresight, noise with clarity, and fatigue with focus. Our clients stop losing money they didn’t know they were losing, and start making decisions with the same intelligence once reserved for Fortune 500 companies.

That’s what InspireEdge AI does, we make visibility the new advantage.

How do you differentiate your approach from other experts in your field?

Most experts in artificial intelligence focus on the technology, I focus on the humanity behind it. My approach is built on a simple belief, AI should not replace judgment, it should refine it.

Where many practitioners build tools, I build systems that think with people, not for them. InspireEdge AI was designed around that principle. I wanted to give small and medium-sized businesses the same decision-making power as Fortune 500 companies without drowning them in dashboards or data noise. We don’t just show metrics, we translate them into clarity, timing, and action.

What makes my approach different is the fusion of disciplines. My foundation in law taught me structure, governance, and precision. My financial training taught me valuation and accountability. My design thinking practice taught me empathy and innovation. Together, they allow me to engineer AI that solves real problems, not hypotheticals.

Most AI solutions chase automation, mine pursue augmentation. I don’t believe in replacing human capacity but in elevating it, helping leaders anticipate, decide, and act faster with confidence.

That mindset shaped RecovCart, our flagship product. It doesn’t just recover lost revenue, it learns from every interaction and adapts strategy in real time. It behaves like a strategist embedded within the business, giving SMEs a competitive edge once reserved for corporations with data science teams.

Beyond the product, I lead with pattern recognition, seeing links between technology, behavior, and business value before they converge. That’s why my frameworks don’t just optimize the present, they forecast the future.

In a field obsessed with algorithms, I build alignment between data and people, systems and purpose, vision and execution. That’s what makes my approach different, I don’t build AI to impress machines, I build it to empower humans.

Can you share a client success story that best illustrates your impact?

One of the most rewarding client experiences I’ve had was working with Audrey Williams-Joseph, a respected CEO, TEDx Speaker, and pioneer in the autism care sector. When Audrey first approached me, her business and personal brand were successful but under-leveraged. She had strong credentials, multiple “Outstanding” Ofsted recognitions, and a proven track record, yet her digital presence and customer engagement strategy didn’t reflect the scale of her impact or the value of her expertise.

The core challenge was one I see often, high-performing professionals losing silent revenue because their brand narrative and customer systems aren’t aligned. In Audrey’s case, we discovered that while her services were exceptional, her conversion path and reactivation strategy left untapped value both from past clients and unrealised partnerships.

We started by deploying InspireEdge AI’s customer reactivation and retention model, powered by behaviour-based insights and AI-driven segmentation. Using those analytics, we identified dormant customer segments and designed targeted campaigns to reignite engagement. Simultaneously, we rebuilt her digital ecosystem from the ground up, a rebrand that included a new logo, messaging architecture, and a website intentionally mapped to her customer journey. Every design choice was strategic, guiding visitors from awareness to conversion while reinforcing her credibility.

The results were transformational. Within weeks, Audrey reported measurable increases in re-engaged clients, new speaking invitations, and recovered revenue opportunities worth over £50,000. But more importantly, her digital brand finally reflected the authority she had earned offline.

What made this project meaningful for me wasn’t just the financial recovery, it was witnessing a leader rediscover confidence in her own story. Audrey didn’t just gain a brand identity, she gained momentum, and that momentum continues to multiply her opportunities.

That’s what defines my impact, transforming clarity into confidence, confidence into conversions, and conversions into sustainable growth.

What are the key indicators that a business needs your intervention now?

There’s a simple way to know when a business needs my intervention when progress feels busy but not profitable.

The first indicator is revenue leakage that doesn’t match activity levels. If your traffic is growing but sales aren’t, or if leads increase without conversion, you’re dealing with invisible loss. That’s usually a signal that your systems aren’t talking to each other, your marketing, sales, and customer data are working in silos instead of synergy.

The second indicator is customer fatigue without loyalty. Many businesses spend heavily on attracting new clients but lose existing ones quietly. When your repeat purchase rate is declining or customer engagement drops after the first interaction, it means you’ve built acquisition, not retention, and retention is where sustainable profit lives.

The third sign is reactive decision-making. If your strategy meetings start with “What happened?” instead of “What’s about to happen?”, then you’re managing outcomes, not orchestrating them. That’s when you need data turned into foresight.

Through InspireEdge AI, we help businesses diagnose these signals in real time. Our systems detect behavioural trends from cart abandonment to competitive price shifts and convert them into predictive insights that tell you what to fix, when to act, and where to double down.

For example, when a retail client saw steady website traffic but erratic revenue, our RecovCart engine traced the loss to mid-funnel friction. By adjusting pricing and automating recovery flows, we reversed a 28% abandonment rate in under six weeks.

In essence, a business needs my intervention when it starts to feel like it’s working hard but moving sideways when visibility turns into guesswork, and growth stops feeling controllable.

That’s when InspireEdge AI steps in to restore clarity, recover revenue, and rebuild the confidence that comes from knowing your next move is backed by intelligence, not instinct.

Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info!

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