A 2023 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report shows this form of artificial intelligence is automating millions of jobs with the hope of eventually changing the future of work.
Automating tasks is viewed to be beneficial, freeing up human workers from routine tasks, and allowing them to focus on more creative and innovative endeavours such as research, design, and problem-solving.
CEO East Africa Magazine profiles three Ugandan businesses harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to automate tasks, improve productivity, and drive sales.
Kweli: Driving sales and automating tasks
Stephen Obeli took an interest in artificial intelligence seven years ago and was intrigued by how fast the technology can automate tasks.
Obeli, a proprietor of Kweli.shop, an e-commerce platform based in Ntinda has typically adopted AI technology for customer support and content creation.
Kweli.shop uses automated conversational WhatsApp chatbots to support customers through various live chat services for faster and seamless services such as orders and deliveries.
Obeli says customers can make orders for any service such as gas refills via WhatsApp without a real person getting involved.
Obeli is leveraging the Meta AI, a new Whatsapp conversational assistant that interacts like humans to give quick feedback to customers.
Meta, the Whatsapp parent company, introduced the Meta AI chat service in September this year.
Whatsapp chat bots typically work by detecting or scanning the keywords entered based on the available information, and then responding with the most appropriate and relevant answer to the selected keywords.
Meta developed the technology to enable developers and businesses to take advantage of AI services through the WhatsApp Application Programming Interface (API) for creative experiences or to make their customer support more useful.
“We can also answer about 60 per cent of customer queries within seconds, day and night,” he boasts.
Obeli notes that the cost of customer support has been reduced by more than half and has had a boost in sales.
Artificial intelligence offers much support to his e-commerce business from marketing and sales, content development such as promotional articles, and videos to design activities for social media.
“With the support of AI, we are now able to produce more content using 30% less staff and in less time. Predominantly AI-generated content now contributes to about 50% of our bottom line,” he explains.
Other benefits gained according to Obeli is that AI is punctual, more accurate and cheaper than humans.
However, like all web-based tools, AI platforms and tools can be hacked.
Besides, there’s high demand for AI tools leading to overloading and some tools have been considered inaccurate requiring specific knowledge and skill sets for one to make the best use of them.
Obeli and his team intend to use artificial intelligence more in future as he looks to fully automate at least 40 per cent of the business in the next 2-5 years.
“We are hopeful that by the end of the year, our conversational chatbots will be able to support customers with certain aftersales support issues up to issue resolution without human intervention,”he sums up.
Emata: Using AI for credit scoring and content creation
Emata, a financial technology firm offering digital loans to farmers with no collateral, has adopted artificial intelligence for credit scoring.
The AI-powered credit scoring system is used to determine how much a farmer can afford to take out as a loan and repay.
Maren Hald Bjørgum, Emata Chief Communications Officer, says farmers generally are considered risky borrowers; however, with artificial intelligence, the company has become more accurate at determining default risk using machine learning models instead of humans.
Machine learning models are used to recognise patterns in data or make predictions.
The AI system collects data points such as delivery data for quantities of milk a farmer delivers over a certain time period, weather data and Know Your Customer (KYC) information.
This data is used to accurately predict how large of a loan a farmer can take out and repay without having to sell off their cattle in the process.
The system has so far returned excellent results to the company with a repayment rate of over 90 per cent.
“As we grow and access more data, our models will become even more accurate, allowing us to help even more farmers across Uganda and East Africa,” Maren boasts.
Aside from the credit scoring, Maren has incorporated several AI tools to automate work, and get “stuff done.”
“I use GrammarlyGO to improve my writing, whether to summarise, shorten, make more formal or simply just copywrite,” she explains
ChatGPT has been a welcome addition to Maren’s life, much more like a virtual office assistant.
The chatbot (ChatGPT) generates content, and can still be used in editing and improving it.
This means any content from social media posts and marketing plans to contracts and grant proposals.
Maren shares that MidjourneyAI is another AI tool that comes in handy to create life-like photos for ads.
While farmers willingly allow Emata to use their photos and names in ads; Maren feels more comfortable using a hypothetical person as financial services is a very private matter for many people.
“I have started using it more and more for our visuals because it ethically makes more sense for me to use a fake (AI-generated) person to advertise our services than a real person,” she says.
However, one must also understand that artificial intelligence has its drawbacks too!
If you’ve worked with AI tools for a while, you’ve learned to recognise their default tone of voice, and it’s painful to see generic AI content flood the social media accounts of Ugandan businesses,” she says.
Maren’s advice to communication professionals is to ensure that the brand speaks with a unique voice that gives value to the company and the user.
As the AI field grows faster, Maren is of the view that businesses should test out and try new tools that can help save time, money and build more secure and resilient solutions.
This needs to go hand in hand with privacy concerns and data ownership.
Waape: Automating job search and hire
A team of 12 young innovators at The Innovation Village are re-inventing the wheel in job search and hiring using their artificial intelligence solution, ‘Waape’.
The innovative platform with an App and website helps employers find the most suitable employee as quickly as possible by matching the right candidate with the right job, especially with the rising gig economy.
Collins Mbulakyalo, co-founder and tech enthusiast at Waape says the innovators started off in 2020 to solve a long-standing problem that companies and individuals face in day-to-day hiring.
Companies struggle to find the right candidates and often end up having too many irrelevant applications.
Even so, job seekers also spend days polishing their application documents and praying to land the right jobs.
As a result, it’s a long and tiring task to match the right skills with the right job, making it hard for many to get jobs today hence fuelling the unchecked youth unemployment rates.
How amazing then would it be, if a candidate or company could get automatic recommendations using artificial intelligence and didn’t need to use their time searching?
Automation and AI technologies are transforming various industries, including Human Resources and recruitment.
Mr Mbulakyalo therefore explains their artificial intelligence solution focuses on connecting people to opportunities not just based on their transcripts or experience, but also on other dynamics like learning ability, communication, accountability and commitment amongst others.
Waape creates AI Automation tools to assist hiring managers with resume screening, interviews, skill assessments, reference checks, culture fit analysis, outreach and onboarding assistance, all driven by advanced AI algorithms.
This holistic approach streamlines the entire hiring process, reducing time-to-hire and ensuring better cultural and skill fit for candidates.
Based on user data and feedback, some of the most frequently used features on Waape’s platform include; automated candidate screening and matching; AI interview conducting and scoring; efficient resume filtering and shortlisting.
“Hiring great talent and finding work you’re passionate about shouldn’t take more than a month, yet they both easily do,” he says.
Waape has helped teams hire African talent in less than a week.
This is done by fast-tracking the hiring process through abstraction and connecting available tech and creative talent to jobs that match their skills, passion, work preferences and benefits.
Mbulakyalo notes that the focus is now to grow their current talent pool from 7,000 to about 50,000 by next year.
The grand ambition for the innovators is now to expand into customer markets in Europe and other continents.