NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 25 — A Nairobi barbershop discovered it had about 180 loyal customers a month only after an artificial intelligence tool began analysing its business data.

📻 Breaking It Down

For a Kenyan farmer, AI is being used for a different problem: identifying crop diseases before they destroy an entire harvest.

And at a primary healthcare provider, the technology is helping clinicians reduce diagnostic and treatment errors.

Across sectors, Kenyan entrepreneurs are increasingly moving AI out of strategy meetings and into everyday business operations, adapting the technology to practical problems ranging from customer management and farming to logistics and healthcare.

📌 What You Need to Know

The emerging applications are less about futuristic machines than about helping businesses make better decisions with data they already generate.

For smaller enterprises in particular, AI is lowering the cost of accessing capabilities that once required specialised staff, expensive software or dedicated data teams.

But the experience of early adopters also highlights a larger question: how can AI be made useful in a market where businesses face limited capital, uneven connectivity, skills shortages and gaps in reliable data?

For Fastagger, a Kenyan deep-tech startup, the starting point was a problem familiar to many small businesses: owners were collecting information but lacked the tools to make sense of it.

Co-founder and CEO Mutembei Kariuki said business owners approached the company after struggling to track sales and customer engagement.

“They were losing customers and lacked structured data to track sales and customer engagement,” Kariuki said.

📰 Source: Capital FM Kenya