Ai Kenya started as a grassroots initiative in 2017. Back then, it was just a small group of enthusiasts trying to demystify artificial intelligence (AI) for local developers and students. Today, it’s a full-blown AI agency with paying clients, policy influence, and a growing catalogue of services. It’s run by Alfred Ongere, who recently left his day job at a local fintech and neobank to focus on the company full-time.
The shift matters. With governments drafting national AI strategies and global firms looking to outsource more AI-adjacent work to African teams, the race is on for who gets to shape the narrative and build the tools. AI Kenya wants in on both.
What does Ai Kenya do?
Ongere describes it as a “360 Degree AI agency” that covers the business and policy ends of AI. That includes corporate training, AI summits, hackathons, readiness assessments, software development, and advisory services. The idea is to offer something practical, not just theoretical, to organisations trying to figure out where to start.
“Ai Kenya operates as a for-profit company,” he said. “Our community program is a form of CSR that we provide to contribute towards the economic and technological development of the country.”
Funding and staying afloat
The company sits under a parent entity called Mind Intelligence. No outside investors. No grants.
“So far it’s mostly self-funded,” Ongere told me two weeks ago. “I was working on Ai Kenya part-time till last year, October. Now, however, I am dedicated full-time and focused on expanding the team.”
Ongere is not rushing to raise venture capital either. Instead, he is betting on client revenue to fuel the next phase of growth. “We want to show that AI services can be a viable business in this market,” he told me. “If we get the structure right, we can replicate it beyond Kenya.”
That’s where things get interesting. Most African AI startups are either research labs chasing grants or early-stage product builders looking for global scale. Ai Kenya doesn’t quite fit that mould. It’s not trying to build the next ChatGPT, rather, it is trying to help businesses understand what AI can actually do for them, then build it with them.
That includes enterprise-facing events like the AI Business Breakfast Summits.
“We want more businesses to intentionally experiment and grow their AI adoption, and break the barriers of efficiency that they currently have,” he said. “So we provide well-curated discussions and spaces that speak a language that they can understand.”
Ai Kenya also makes revenue from consulting services, including corporate trainings on AI, AI advisory services, AI readiness audits, hackathon as a service, and candidate screening.
Ongere is betting that Kenya’s private sector is ready for that kind of support, and not just from flashy pitch decks, but from people who’ve been close to the ecosystem for years.
“The more businesses leverage AI correctly without making many mistakes and errors, the more the economy grows,” he said.
Shaping AI policy
Still, Ai Kenya isn’t ignoring the policy side. According to Ongere, the team contributed to Kenya’s newly released National AI Strategy under the Ministry of ICT. In 2024, it also helped push back against a proposed Robotics and AI Society Bill that critics say lacked public engagement. Ongere and his team joined other voices in calling for a more inclusive process.
“We collaborate with different institutions, particularly the government, NGOs, associations, and professional bodies. We play an active role in policy, regulation, and strategy discussions that touch on AI as an area,” he said.
On the private sector side, Ai Kenya has done commissioned work for Microsoft, Uber, McKinsey, and Insight2Impact, among others. Microsoft backed its podcast to support ecosystem mapping. It has delivered hackathons and townhalls for multiple partners, including the Pulitzer Centre and Global Partnerships for Sustainable Development Data.
There’s also a regional flavour to what Ai Kenya is building. While Kenya remains the core focus, Ongere is thinking about East Africa.
But he’s cautious. “Our core focus is Kenya, and we will then expand to other countries once we have achieved the different programmatic and structural milestones we would want.”
That structure, he says, has to be multisectoral. Ai Kenya isn’t only working with fintechs or healthtechs. It’s jumping into any sector where there’s a useful AI application, sometimes even creating new ones. One example is a recent townhall on AI labour that focused on the lives and rights of data workers, most of whom are invisible in global supply chains but crucial to training machine learning models.
Ai Kenya is seemingly not chasing hype or scale. Its work appears to be grounded in training teams, advising companies, and shaping policy.
The global connection is still there, though. Ai Kenya has been present at events like GITEX Global in Dubai, Elevate Festival in Austria, and Deep Learning Indaba. Ongere says Ai Kenya doesn’t belong to any single coalition but stays plugged in by contributing where there’s alignment.
At the centre of it all is a bet that businesses in Africa don’t need more hype. They need people who can translate AI into real outcomes.
So what’s next? “We empowered over 10,000 people with our work for the last 7 years. The next stage means empowering more people, so sustainability is key to achieving that. So helping organizations and individuals achieve more in matters AI, with sustainability at the core,” he concluded.
