Business Process Outsourcing firms in Kenya should explore partnerships with parliament to scale their operations to constituencies and wards.
The National Assembly’s Communication, Information and Innovation Departmental Committee says such arrangements could be forged with the parliament or respective constituency leaders.
“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,” said the National Assembly’s Communication, Information and Innovation Departmental Committee, Chairperson, John Kiarie who led committee members on a familiarisation tour of Artificial Intelligence (AI) BPO firm, Sama at Sameer Business Park in Nairobi.
“The global BPO market commands more than US$262 billion in annual revenues, and this committee will work tirelessly to ensure that Kenya grabs a piece of this pie as more than 56% of global firms prefer to outsource their business processes.”
Sama, Vice President of Global Service Delivery, Annepeace Alwala, said the firm is currently working with eight of the ten leading global automobile firms on developing autonomous vehicles. The firm also works with major agricultural production firms that have deployed AI-based AgTech solutions for plant husbandry.
With a fully-fledged global service delivery centre in Nairobi, Alwala says Sama provides quality data annotation solutions for computer vision that power Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models and is one of the world’s leading AI value chain players.
“Kenya is well positioned to claim a bigger piece of the global AI data collection and labelling market that is estimated to hit the US$ 18 billion mark in the next six years. 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,” said Alwala.
Currently, 25% of Fortune 50 companies, including GM, Ford, Microsoft, and Google, trust Sama to help deliver industry-leading ML models driven by a mission to expand opportunities for underserved individuals through the digital economy.