From a citizen’s point of view on AI

Everywhere I turn, from Youtube ads to learning material, all I see is a bunch of AI this AI that. Sometimes to the point of “ I swear if I see one more AI ad, I will throw hands”. I can’t even watch my go-to content on Youtube in peace and I’m not about to pay for Youtube premium either.

A Little Introspection

However, this constant bombardment has made me go down the rabbit hole. As a Kenyan citizen and an outsider to government operations, I find myself questioning how exactly is AI being used to improve my life as a Kenyan citizen? Both levels of governments(national and county) talk about embracing technology, but what does that look like for the ordinary people? I know many fight the use of technology to automate and improve processes to their own “benefit”. The real question though remains: how can even the simplest AI application make life better for citizens?

As a data fellow, I sometimes interact with AI at a behind the scene level. Be it selecting models, cleaning and processing data, tuning systems, evaluating performance, etc. From this perspective, it’s easy to get lost in the math and algorithms: predicting values, classifying data, grouping patterns, etc.

I wonder though, **beyond the models and metrics, how much of this technology is truly helping citizens?** At the end of the day, AI shouldn’t just be inspirational — it should be practical, solving human-centered challenges that affect daily life. Looking at the future, AI can be inspirational and dreamy in the possibilities, but the greatest benefit lies in its use to solve human centered challenges.

In the simplest terms, AI is basically a computer system that learns how different information points interact that leads to a specific behavior. Then using this learning, it mimics the behavior to try and predict a specific aspect of this relationship.

The Kenyan Context: Where Could AI Actually Help?

I look at our country, Kenya, struggling with so many gaps in how to build a better country for us all and I wonder how can we use AI to solve some of these challenges. Let us look at education or health or agriculture, the common essentials.

Let’s take healthcare as an example. A hospital relies on three key resources: human personnel, infrastructure, and patients. In the real world we have guidelines that try to make some of these processes effective, for example there is doctor-to-population ratio guideline of 1 doctor to 1000 people as pushed by WHO. For Kenya for the year 2023 there was doctor-to-population ratio of 2.89 per 10000 , far below the ideal. And that’s just looking at doctors; we also need to consider nurses, lab technicians, and administrative staff, plus the facilities themselves.

In this case we can set a baseline for human resources, physical infrastructure needed to cater to a number of patients based on the datapoints touching on the patient(number of patients treated vs area population, conditions treated, frequency of visits, complexity of treatment, proximity of other related services to the institution, cost of treatment, etc). So if I was in charge of health at the county level as health is a devolved government function, then I think in planning the predictions would be supper helpful in my consultations and planning with all the involved partners. Would this completely solve all the challenges, not really but it would provide a data-informed foundation for smarter decisions, resource allocation, and long-term planning.

Simple AI, Big Impact

If an area has a lot of options when it comes to accessing health services, for example, an AI analysis could autonomously highlight the specific gaps to strengthen existing public facilities instead of building new ones. Scaling up human resources without improving infrastructure leads to the point of diminishing returns, where adding more workers no longer improves outcomes. These are the kinds of simple, actionable insights AI can provide, even without advanced or expensive tools.

There’s enormous potential for applying AI in Kenya’s health sector and that’s before we even get to the complex stuff like predictive diagnostics or personalized medicine. The same logic applies to education and agriculture: use the data we already have, make small but consistent improvements, and keep citizens at the center of every decision.

Final Thoughts

AI doesn’t have to remain a buzzword used in ads or political speeches. If implemented thoughtfully with a focus on citizen needs, data quality, and collaboration between experts and policymakers — it can help solve real, human challenges. Otherwise, it risks becoming just another shiny term that never truly reaches the people it’s meant to serve.”