AI in Your Everyday Life

The Kenyan AI tour: seven places you're already using it

1. M-Pesa fraud detection

Safaricom has said it uses systems to detect fraud on M-Pesa, and the details are not public. A typical fraud-detection system looks at patterns such as time of day, amount, who you send to and where you are. When a transaction differs sharply from your normal pattern, it may be paused or flagged for review. This is called "anomaly detection". It may be why you sometimes get a confirmation message for a transaction that used to go straight through.

2. Safaricom and Kenya Power chatbots

Many large organisations, including telecoms and utilities, use chatbots that try to understand a message like "my token is not working" and send you to the right help. How each chatbot works inside is not usually public, but the idea is the same: software that reads your words and picks a likely answer.

3. Google Maps traffic on Thika Road

Maps sees where people are moving (anonymised GPS from millions of phones) and predicts which roads are clogging up. If it says "20 min faster via Kasarani," it's a real-time AI prediction based on thousands of people's phones moving slowly on Thika Rd right now.

4. YouTube and Netflix recommendations

"Watch next" is not random. An ML model scored thousands of possible videos for you based on: what you've watched, what you stopped watching halfway, what people similar to you watched, and what time of day it is. This is why you get sucked in for 2 hours.

5. Your phone's face unlock and photo app

Your phone runs a face-recognition model on-device, never sends your face to the cloud. Your photo gallery's "People" tab also runs clustering AI to group photos by person, automatically.

6. PlantVillage: AI for Kenyan farmers

Kenyan farmers increasingly use apps like Nuru (PlantVillage) to diagnose crop diseases. You photograph a sick maize leaf, the AI identifies the disease (e.g., fall armyworm vs. maize lethal necrosis) and suggests treatment. This is image-recognition AI solving real African agriculture problems, built partly by researchers from Penn State and local African teams.

7. Hello Tractor, Apollo Agriculture, Shamba Pride

Kenyan agritech companies such as Apollo Agriculture and Hello Tractor use data and software in areas like credit scoring, satellite crop monitoring and tractor booking. Read each company's own site to see what they say they do. Not every feature is AI, which is a good habit to practise: ask "is this really AI?"

Where AI is coming next in Kenya

• Healthcare: AI tools that help read chest X-rays are being tested in several countries. Specialists such as radiologists are few and mostly in big towns, so this could help, but any such tool needs doctors to check it.
• Education: personalised study assistants such as Khanmigo already exist. Kenyan-made ones may follow.
• Legal: tools that help review and draft documents are arriving for law firms. A lawyer still has to check the result.
• Customer service: more Kenyan businesses are adding chatbots. The question is whether each one is useful or frustrating.

The exercise that changes how you see the world

For the next 48 hours, every time you use a digital tool, ask yourself: "Is this using AI?" You'll be shocked how often the answer is yes. Try this with:

• Your bank app (categorising transactions → AI)
• Instagram / TikTok (feed order → AI)
• Google Photos search ("show me photos of Mombasa" → AI)
• Spam filter in Gmail (AI)
• Autocorrect on your keyboard (AI)
• Ride-hailing surge pricing in Nairobi (AI)

By the end of 48 hours, you'll never see "AI" as abstract again. It's infrastructure, like electricity was in 1925.

List 5 places where AI already appears in the work of a [your industry] in Kenya. For each one, say what it does, one benefit and one risk. If you are not sure, say so.