The National Assembly’s Communication, Information and Innovation Departmental Committee has pledged to consider legislative provisions to help accelerate the expansion of Business Process Outsourcing businesses across Kenya.

Speaking during a familiarisation tour of Artificial Intelligence (AI) BPO firm, Sama at Nairobi’s Sameer Business Park, Committee members led by Chairperson John Kiarie, confirmed plans to undertake the necessary legislative reforms to power the setup of such companies in the constituency and ward levels.

Noting that Sama employs over 3400 staffers and serves global technology organisations, including NASA, Walmart, Google and General Motors, among others, the committee, Kiarie said, will consider legislative reforms as part of the National Digital Superhighway and Creative Economy strategy.

The House team reiterated the government’s commitment to setting up 1,450 Digital Innovation Hubs in every ward in the country and establishing eight remote working and other online enterprises to enable the youth to find work opportunities in the online space.

As part of the Digital Innovation Hubs strategy, the Committee has also petitioned Sama, among other BPO operators, to consider forming partnerships with Constituency leaders to scale their operations to Constituency and Wards.

“The committee is impressed by Sama’s data labelling, annotation, and curation work, and we will work to ensure that we provide a conducive legislative and related investment environment to replicate this success at the constituency level,” Kiarie said.

He added, “The global BPO market commands more than $262 billion in annual revenues, and this committee will work tirelessly to ensure that Kenya grabs a piece of this pie as more than 56 percent of global firms prefer to outsource their business processes.”

Read also: Sama boosts AI value chain in Kenya and Uganda with multi-cloud integration

Service delivery centre in Nairobi

Sama, Vice President of Global Service Delivery Annepeace Alwala, disclosed that the firm is working with eight of the 10 leading global automobile companies on developing autonomous vehicles. The firm also works with major agricultural production firms that have deployed AI-based AgTech solutions for plant husbandry.

With a fully-fledged global service delivery centre in Nairobi, Kenya, Sama, Ms Alwala said, provides quality data annotation solutions for computer vision that power Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models and is one of the world’s leading AI value chain players.

“Kenya is well positioned to claim a bigger piece of the global AI data collection and labelling market that is estimated to hit the US$ 18 billion mark in the next six years,” she said, adding that “to gain a bigger share of the market, Kenya must however actively work to promote and market the country as an ideal BPO destination as other countries such as Philippines, India and even Uganda are working very hard to maintain and gain a piece of the market.”

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