NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 1 — Artificial intelligence has arrived in Kenya long before the country has fully figured out what to do with it.From banks and insurance companies to technology firms, newsrooms and small businesses, Kenyans are increasingly turning to AI tools to write, translate, analyse information, generate images, assist with coding and automate routine work.The scale of adoption is striking. The Digital 2026 Mid-Year Global Update, based on research covering more than 240,000 people across 54 markets, found that 97.5 per cent of Kenyan internet users aged 16 and above had used at least one AI tool in the previous month — the highest rate among the markets tracked. Kenya was followed by the United Arab Emirates at 94.2 per cent and Indonesia at 93.6 per cent.But beneath the excitement lies a more difficult question: Is artificial intelligence delivering the economic revolution being promised, or is much of the current enthusiasm simply hype?For businesses, AI promises lower operating costs, greater productivity and new products. For workers, it has revived fears that machines could make some jobs obsolete. For consumers, it has opened new concerns around misinformation, privacy and accountability when automated systems get things wrong.Kenya is therefore moving into a more consequential phase of the AI debate — one that is no longer about whether the technology matters, but whether widespread adoption can translate into measurable economic gains.Technology Service Providers of Kenya (TESPOK) Chairman James Turuthi says Kenyans are adopting AI at extraordinary speed, but cautions against confusing widespread use with economic transformation.“Kenyans are using AI faster than almost anyone on earth. That part is real. What’s still catching up is whether that usage has actually changed how businesses make money,” Mr Turuthi says.Many companies remain at the pilot stage, testing AI for customer service, marketing, fraud detection, credit scoring, document processing and data analysis.The real measure of success, however, is not whether an organisation has introduced an AI tool. It is whether that tool saves money, generates revenue, improves decision-making, increases productivity or delivers a better service.PwC’s 2026 Kenya CEO Survey points to a similar challenge, identifying a significant gap between AI readiness and execution and highlighting the need for greater investment in AI skills and innovation ecosystems.The wider business picture is equally cautious. PwC’s global survey found that chief executives are investing in AI even as immediate returns often remain elusive.Turuthi says fewer than a quarter of chief executives who have invested in AI report increased revenue, with a similar proportion reporting meaningful cost savings.“The gap between ‘we’re using AI’ and ‘AI moved our bottom line’ is where I’d tell people to keep their expectations honest,” he says.There is another problem: Kenya is largely an AI consumer rather than a producer.Turuthi estimates that only about one in 10 Kenyan organisations are developing AI capability in-house, with most relying on vendors, cloud platforms or AI features already embedded in software they use.“That’s a sensible, low-cost way to get started. But it also means the ‘Kenya as an AI powerhouse’ narrative is ahead of where we actually sit in the value chain,” he says.The distinction matters because widespread use does not automatically translate into economic value.A country that primarily consumes AI products can benefit from improved productivity, but much of the intellectual property, technology ownership and financial value may continue to accrue elsewhere.The appeal of generative AI lies partly in its ability to perform tasks that previously consumed hours of human labour.It can draft correspondence, summarise lengthy documents, produce marketing material, translate text, transcribe meetings, analyse information and assist programmers.For a small business owner, AI could reduce the need to outsource simple promotional material. For an accountant or lawyer, it can reduce the time spent sorting through documents. For a newsroom, it can assist with transcription, translation and research.AI can produce information that sounds convincing but is false. It can misunderstand context, reproduce biases contained in its training data and provide confident answers even when it lacks sufficient information.Turuthi argues that AI is most valuable when used for specific, repetitive tasks rather than treated as an all-knowing machine.Among the practical applications he cites are fraud detection in mobile-money transactions, customer-service chatbots, agricultural tools that identify crop diseases from photographs and systems that assist with transcription and translation between English, Kiswahili and other languages.“These are real, tested uses, not hype. Use AI as a smart assistant, not an oracle. Verify its output, especially for anything involving money, health, or legal decisions,” he says.
This page contains an attributed headline and the preview text supplied through the publisher’s RSS feed. Copyright in the original reporting belongs to Capital News.
