AI Takes Center Stage at the 2026 InsurTech Forum Nairobi

By Elijah Mbalaria

At the InsurTech Forum Nairobi (ITFN) 2026, held at the Emara Ole-Sereni, the artificial intelligence conversation took a sharp turn away from technical jargon toward corporate accountability. Henock Eyob, Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), delivered a keynote around the questions trailing corporate circles across East Africa: Is AI real, where is the tangible value, and why is it proving so hard to capture?

Eyob revealed to insurance executives and business leaders that the major problem facing the uptake of AI is not necessarily the technology, but leadership.

Many organizations eagerly build dashboards, commission pilot programs, and launch innovation labs. When pushed to articulate the actual value or ROI created, they seem to falter. This is caused by a lack of cohesive strategy and a systemic failure to assign someone who is personally accountable for outcomes. As a result, entire organizations consume vanity metrics that look incredibly busy on an annual report but mean nothing to the bottom line.

Achieving Genuine Commercial Transformation from AI

To help leaders break out of this loop, Eyob introduced a clear three-tier framework tracking how organizations can progress from surface-level experiments to tangible change:

• Deploy: Utilizing AI to perform existing tasks faster and cheaper. While this is the most common entry point for businesses, it also has the lowest ceiling.

• Reshape: Re-engineering how critical operations actually function, rather than merely speeding up outdated workflows.

• Reinvent: Building entirely new commercial capabilities that were impossible before. In insurance, this could look like real-time fraud-signal detection or predictive underwriting.

The common pitfall in Kenya is that the majority of companies stall entirely at the “Deploy” phase. They use AI as a digital band-aid, never scaling into the deeper territories where technology fundamentally reshapes the economics of the business.

When executives treat AI as an isolated technology program rather than an overarching business priority, they end up with expensive, highly capable systems that face quiet resistance from frontline staff.

The operational weaknesses Eyob observes in AI deployment are mirrored across various sectors, including the businesses of book publishing and marketing. In publishing, a basic “Deploy” strategy appears in the use of generative AI to produce marketing copy and quick book descriptions. While this approach is cheap and fast, it quickly exposes the limits of pure automation. Books heavily sanitized by AI tend to strip away the very element that makes a manuscript commercially successful: human nuance, authentic voice, and emotional resonance.

The writer is a research assistant at Free Press Publishers.