How to Use AI in Marketing in Kenya

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are quickly becoming essential tools for Kenyan digital marketers, from startups in Nairobi to established brands across the country.

With a growing number of AI-powered solutions entering the market, it’s easy for businesses to feel overwhelmed or unsure of how best to leverage these tools to gain a competitive edge.

That’s why in this guide, we explore how marketers in Kenya can use AI to achieve key business goals such as boosting productivity, predicting customer behavior more accurately, increasing sales, improving customer retention, and much more.

We’ll also highlight challenges Kenyan businesses may face when integrating AI into their marketing strategies, and offer real-world examples of successful AI adoption including both global brands like Adidas and Allianz, and local businesses leading the way with AI innovation.

What is AI Marketing?

AI marketing refers to the use of artificial intelligence to assist marketers in:

Automating or simplifying repetitive tasks like content creation, customer segmentation, or campaign reporting.
Predicting customer behaviors such as purchasing patterns or app usage habits.
Delivering personalized experiences across SMS, email, social media, and e-commerce platforms.

While some AI techniques like machine learning have been in use globally for years, the rise of tools like ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms has made AI more accessible to Kenyan marketers than ever before.

Also Read: Google AI Mode: The Next Evolution of Search

Why It Matters for Kenya

In a fast-growing digital economy like Kenya’s where mobile usage, social media engagement, and e-commerce adoption are on the rise AI provides a powerful way to:

Reach the right customers with the right message.
Make data-driven decisions without needing large teams or expensive tools.
Stand out in competitive markets like fintech, agritech, retail, and digital services.

Whether you’re a marketer at a small business in Kisumu or leading campaigns for a pan-African brand in Nairobi, AI can help you work smarter, not harder.

AI Use Cases and Benefits for Marketing Teams in Kenya

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming how marketing teams in Kenya operate from customer insights and engagement to content creation and campaign optimization.

To better understand how AI can support your marketing efforts, it helps to look at the three main categories of AI tools that serve different but complementary purposes:

1. Predictive AI

This type of AI analyzes historical data to identify trends and forecast future customer behavior such as predicting which customers are most likely to make a purchase, unsubscribe, or respond to a promotion.

In Kenya, businesses are using predictive AI to tailor offers during seasonal sales (like back-to-school or festive periods) or to reduce churn in mobile-based services and e-commerce platforms.

2. Conversational AI

Powered by natural language processing (NLP), conversational AI understands and responds to customer inquiries in real time through platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or integrated live chat.

Many Kenyan companies, especially in fintech and customer support-heavy industries like logistics and telco, are adopting this technology to provide faster and more accurate responses in English, Kiswahili, or even Sheng.

3. Generative AI

The newest and most exciting category, generative AI tools (like ChatGPT and image generation platforms) help marketers create original content including email copy, blog posts, ad creatives, social media captions, and videos.

For instance, a small business in Nairobi might use generative AI to produce professional-quality marketing materials without needing a full creative team.

Most marketing teams in Kenya whether in retail, agriculture tech, real estate, or digital media are finding value in using a combination of these AI types.

For example:

Use predictive AI to segment high-value customers.
Use generative AI to create targeted campaigns.
Use conversational AI to engage customers instantly via chat.

Additionally, traditional AI tools like product recommendation engines and customer behavior tracking are helping marketers personalize content across websites, mobile apps, SMS, email campaigns, and even in-store experiences.

Key Benefits for Kenyan Marketers

When properly implemented, AI offers a powerful range of benefits for marketing teams, including:

Faster, more efficient campaign launches with AI-generated content.
Improved conversion rates thanks to personalized recommendations and offers.
Smarter segmentation using predictive analytics based on local customer behavior.
Better customer support through conversational bots on popular messaging platforms.
Higher team productivity, freeing marketers from repetitive manual tasks.

In the next section, we’ll break down six of the most effective ways Kenyan businesses can integrate AI into their marketing workflows to unlock these advantages.

1. Predict Customer Behaviors

Traditional marketing tools enabled teams to target customers based on known traits and behaviors, like locations, devices, and past purchases. Learning how to use AI in marketing in Kenya opens many new targeting opportunities, including the ability to segment customers based on what they’re likely to do.

For example, marketers in Kenya can use AI to identify customers who:

Have a high discount affinity.
Have a high predicted customer lifetime value (CLTV).
Have a high likelihood to purchase or engage on a specific channel (e.g., email or SMS).

Learning how to use AI in marketing in Kenya can help you utilize your budget more effectively and uncover new opportunities for driving revenue.

For example, you can focus your campaigns only on customers who have a high likelihood to purchase to ensure you’re reaching people with real buying intent. You can also show discount messages only to users with a high discount affinity (instead of to your entire customer base) to convert them faster while protecting your profit margins.

2. Deliver Personalized Product Recommendations

AI-powered product recommendation engines can analyze large data sets and show relevant products based on customers’ preferences, needs, and interests.

For example, at Insider, we have our Smart Recommender tool which uses customer data to deliver tailored recommendations at each touchpoint, including your website, mobile app, emails, and more. Learning how to use AI in marketing in Kenya includes using tools like this, which offer a variety of recommendation algorithms, including ones that use customer data (e.g., user-based or location-based bestsellers) and ones that don’t (e.g., best-sellers or new arrivals). This is crucial for eCommerce brands that want to help customers discover relevant products and services as quickly as possible.

For a real-life example, refer to our case study with MAC Cosmetics. This brand used our Smart Recommender to show “frequently viewed,” “purchased together,” and “top sellers” on product and cart pages, which helped them achieve a 20.56% add-to-cart rate and a 2.3% increase in conversion rates.

3. Generate Campaign Segments, Journeys, and Content

Generative AI has recently opened up plenty of new opportunities for marketers looking to boost productivity and revenue. While most people associate generative AI with creating copy, images, or (soon) videos, learning how to use AI in marketing in Kenya includes using this technology throughout the entire campaign-building process.

Insider’s Sirius AI™ (our generative AI solution) can use simple text prompts to create customer segments, customer journeys, images, and campaign text (e.g. subject lines or body copy).

All you have to do is tell the AI what your goal is. For instance, you may want to find customer segments that are at a high risk of churning and create an automated journey to engage them with engaging, relevant content based on their needs and preferences.

4. Automate Channel Selection and Send-Time Optimization

One of the most difficult tasks of the campaign creation and marketing automation processes is deciding which channels to use and when to trigger each message (e.g., email, SMS, social media, and so on). This can easily take months of A/B testing to get right.

Learning how to use AI in marketing in Kenya helps solve that problem by analyzing each recipient’s behavioral patterns to determine the best time and channel to contact them. At Insider, we call these features Send-Time Optimization (STO) and Next-Best Channel.

You can easily enable STO for each specific campaign message (e.g., email, SMS, WhatsApp message, and so on). At the same time, you can leverage Next-Best Channel by using a simple drag-and-drop editor and selecting the channels you want to try in each campaign.

5. Scale A/B Tests Across Channels and Speed Up Campaign Optimization

A/B testing is another crucial marketing task that becomes time-consuming as you scale your experiments and customer base. Not only do you need to prepare test hypotheses and campaign materials, but you must also manually review and update each experiment based on its results.

Learning how to use AI in marketing in Kenya can take a lot of the work off your plate here as well. For example, A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection is a feature that optimizes each journey by guiding users to the winning variant in an A/B test. You just need to provide a duration for the test and select a winning metric beforehand, like open rate, conversions, or revenue.

That way, you don’t need to waste time manually reviewing each experiment’s results and optimizing it based on them.

6. Have Unstructured Conversations with Customers at Scale

Providing fast, high-quality customer service at scale has always been a challenge, especially online. The sheer volume of customer queries makes it impossible for many brands to respond quickly without an automated solution that can answer at least simple questions instantly.

Learning how to use AI in marketing in Kenya is important because AI has been a big help here for years. Thanks to techniques like NLP, AI chatbots can understand the intent behind each query and provide relevant information in seconds or connect customers to a human representative when necessary.

This is essential for companies that want to provide exceptional customer service and drive more revenue via data-driven customer conversations. For example, Renault used our AI virtual assistant to alleviate the pressure from the customer support team, offering automated, relevant responses to over 350 different prompts on WhatsApp.

This resulted in a 93% decrease in customer service wait times and a 4% increase in conversion rates.

Also Read: AI and Automation in Digital Marketing: The 2025 Game-Changer

The Main Challenges of Using AI in Marketing in Kenya

As you can see, AI tools offer many potential benefits to marketing teams. However, learning how to use AI in marketing in Kenya also comes with a set of challenges.

First, AI can only be as good as the data it’s trained on. If the data it’s using is not accurate, the results will be suboptimal or even negative for the customer experience as a whole.

This can be an issue for teams whose customer data is scattered across disconnected systems, like customer relationship management (CRM) tools, content management systems, analytics platforms, and so on.

That’s why at Insider, we offer an industry-leading customer data platform (CDP) that can take that disconnected data and organize it into a convenient database. Having your data in one place ensures that your AI marketing tools are providing insights based on all the available information about your customers.

Another hurdle is the time it takes to train AI solutions to work in the way you want them to.

For example, if you’re using an AI-powered chatbot to automate customer conversations, you’ll need to spend time on tasks like setting knowledge limits and building conversational flows. That’s why it’s a good idea to partner with an experienced vendor who can guide you through the process as smoothly as possible.

Finally, data privacy is another budding problem for many AI use cases. To avoid it, you need to understand what data your solution is using and ensure that data is collected in a way that complies with privacy regulations.

Examples of How to Use AI in Marketing in Kenya: Strategies and Their Impact on Key Metrics

To round out this guide, we’ll explore how four brands used AI-powered marketing strategies in different industries including retail, travel and hospitality, and financial services to automate time-consuming tasks and drive business results.

Adidas: Delivering Personalized Product Recommendations for Higher Conversion Rates

Adidas is the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe and the second-largest in the world.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the brand’s traffic grew exponentially but their team was ill-equipped to engage and retain new visitors. That’s why they needed a solution that could help them deliver personalization at scale, which is one of AI’s main use cases.

The company’s marketing team settled on Insider as their vendor of choice for achieving their goals. Specifically, they used our platform’s segmentation and Category Optimization tools to boost AOV from new users by 259% in just one month and drive a 50.3% increase in mobile conversion rates.

Our growth experts also helped them implement Smart Recommender our AI-powered tool for delivering highly personalized cross-channel product recommendations.

This tool enabled Adidas to deliver relevant product suggestions to their customers, including trending products, recently viewed items, location-based bestsellers, and often purchased together.