There’s a version of the AI conversation that doesn’t fit the African SME reality very well. It assumes large engineering teams, mature data pipelines, and the budget to experiment for the sake of experimenting.
Most of the businesses I work with don’t have any of that. What they have is a small team running a real operation, where every hour spent on the wrong thing costs something.
The opportunities that actually move the needle
For most SMEs in Kenya, the highest-leverage AI use cases right now are unglamorous:
- Drafting client communications faster
- Summarizing long email threads into action items
- Cleaning up messy spreadsheets
- Categorizing customer queries before they hit a human
- Generating first-pass reports from existing data
None of these are “transformational.” All of them save real time.
Full article coming soon. This is a working draft.
If you’re trying to figure out where AI fits in your own business, let’s talk.