Develop AI’s Founding Director is Paul McNally, an award-winning journalist and entrepreneur with 20 years of experience starting companies in AI, podcasting and community radio.

He started Develop AI in January 2023 to create innovative AI projects, report on AI and train people globally on how to AI responsibly. He has spoken about AI at conferences in Addis Ababa, Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg and Bonn.

He has won 16 awards, including a CNN African Journalist of The Year Award and he was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2016 where he focused on improving community media in Africa.

McNally is also the Founder of Develop Audio, an organisation that produces podcasts of the highest quality with a focus on social justice, human rights and corruption reporting, in a range of African languages. They are building a community of trained journalists committed to creating quality audio.

He worked as an investigative journalist for 15 years on stories involving assassinations, HIV, disinformation and wrongful convictions. He is the author of the book, The Street, published by Pan Macmillan, on police corruption & torture in South Africa.

He has worked with DW Akademie's PodcasTraining project where he has helped create their Knowledge Guide, developed course materials in investigative podcasting and has conducted trainings for them in Lilongwe, Prague, Addis Ababa and Bonn.

He has been a member of the South Africa Media Innovation Program (SAMIP) and The Journalism and Media Lab (Jamlab).

From 2020 to 2022 he was the CEO and Co-Founder of Volume, a podcast production company that focused on serving NGOs. While he was CEO Volume gained investment from the Media Development Investment Fund.

In 2019 he created, produced and hosted the award-winning, voice-note disinformation show What’s Crap on WhatsApp?

In 2017 he created, hosted and produced Alibi, Africa’s first investigative, award-winning podcast.

In 2015 he started Citizen Justice Network, a project based at Wits University that trains community paralegals in South Africa and Kenya to be radio journalists. He worked extensively with community radio stations around Africa. The project won The Innovating Justice Challenge in The Hague in 2017.

In 2013 he created the award-winning radio show and podcast The Science Inside which aimed to improve the culture of science journalism in South Africa.

Before that he worked for 8 years in magazines and newspapers. During that time he won a CNN African Journalist of The Year Award. He taught and convened courses at The University of Cape Town (UCT) on feature writing & print production.

He has a masters in Creative Writing and a bachelor's in Psychology from UCT.

Email him on paul@developai.co.za or contact him on LinkedIn.