The hype, briefly
Every SME owner has heard "AI will transform your business." Most of them have also seen demos that don't survive contact with their actual operations.
We've spent the last six months embedding AI features into real Kenyan SME products — point-of-sale, sports predictions, customer support, lead qualification. Here's the honest scorecard.
What worked
1. Smart auto-categorisation
The single highest-ROI feature: classifying inbound WhatsApp messages or support tickets into categories before a human sees them. Cuts triage time by ~60%. Cheap, fast, and the failure mode is mild (a human still sees everything).
2. Receipt and invoice extraction
OCR + a small LLM for clean-up is a magic combination. We do this for the FelixTech POS — snap a supplier receipt, get a clean JSON of items and prices ready to import. Customers love it.
3. Draft-mode content
Letting users start from a draft instead of a blank page. Product descriptions, SMS campaigns, social posts. The human always edits — that's the point.
What flopped
1. Chatbot-as-first-contact
Customers in Kenya overwhelmingly prefer WhatsApp with a human. The chatbot got blamed for everything. We've quietly removed it from two products this year.
2. AI-generated price recommendations
The models don't have the local context. They suggested wildly off-market prices. We replaced this with rules + a small statistical model and got better results.
3. Voice interfaces in English-only
Anything that didn't gracefully handle Swahili and Sheng failed. We're now bilingual-by-default for any voice or speech feature.
What we wish we'd known
- Latency matters more than smarts. A 200ms okay-answer beats a 4s great-answer in WhatsApp UX.
- Cost discipline early. A naive integration can rack up $200 in tokens in a weekend.
- Caching is half the product. Most user prompts repeat. Cache aggressively.
The honest take
AI is real, useful, and ready — but the wins are unglamorous. Auto-categorisation, OCR clean-up, draft assistance. Save the agent dreams for v2.
If you're an SME owner wondering where to start, book a 30-minute chat. We'll tell you what's worth doing.