There is a specific kind of conviction that precedes building something from nothing. Not optimism — conviction. The belief that you are supposed to be doing this, at this moment, even when the evidence is thin. Mary Njoki had that conviction at 23, with a modem, a laptop, a free website template, and a name — Glass House PR — chosen because it meant clear communication and transparency. Thirteen years later, the agency she built from that start is one of the most recognizable Pan-African communications brands on the continent, and last week released the 2026 State of PR in Africa Report — the most rigorous piece of industry research the African PR sector has ever produced.

I sat down with Mary for a full hour a couple of weeks ago on the Pure Digital Passion podcast. We covered her origin story, the report’s genesis, and what the findings actually mean when you hear the context behind the data. If you’ve read my earlier analysis of the report on this blog, this is the human story behind the numbers.

She Did Not Start in PR. She Started in Code.

The Glass House PR story begins with a girl who wanted to study computer science. Mary finished high school at 16 — that detail alone tells you something — and studied mathematics to qualify for CS, then BIT at Graffins College when she could not afford the programme she wanted. When her first employer at Softlink Options put her in marketing rather than the production team she had asked for, she was frustrated. Many years later, she says, it makes sense.

The bridge to PR came through K Crew, a Nairobi youth community built around Kenya’s gospel and music scene. Working volunteer PR for music events, something clicked. She did not yet know what PR was — she went online at 22 to research the definition — but she was already asking the question that now defines the 2026 report: how do you converge PR with technology? What you are seeing now, she told me, is something she had already thought about many years ago.

The early years of Glass House PR were largely pro bono. She offered to do PR for artists and SMEs for free, or for KES 5,000, in exchange for recommendation letters. She built her own website, understood meta tags and SEO before most PR agencies knew what those words meant, and created her own search visibility from scratch. In her early twenties she wore big wigs to look older in corporate rooms. She is clear that nobody has to do that — but she did what she had to do.

The validation moment came in year three. Facebook emailed agencies looking for partners in Kenya. Glass House PR responded quickly, was shortlisted, and delivered. The conversation that followed — a 23-year-old who started with a modem and a laptop is working with Facebook — opened doors that never closed again.

“The doors were opening as I was walking. I didn’t even have the bigger picture.” — Mary Njoki

The Turkey Moment: Why This Report Exists

Every significant initiative has a precipitating moment. For the State of PR in Africa Report, it was a communications summit in Turkey where Mary was one of very few African participants — and the only Black African in the room. The first question she was asked was how the Israel-Palestine conflict was affecting Kenya. Her answer was direct: her grandmother in the village is thinking about whether she has fed her cows. The frame of reference is entirely different.

What she saw was C-Suite communications leaders — people who shape global narratives — with a profoundly inaccurate picture of Africa. One executive still referred to Africa as a single country. She came back to Nairobi and told her Research person: you have to do a State of PR in Africa report. The first edition came from industry contacts and determination. By the second, the network was assembled. She pushed the team to cover 30 countries. They settled on 16. She wants 54 eventually.

81% Are Using AI — But Read That Carefully

The headline finding that most people will take from the 2026 report is that 81.5% of senior PR professionals across Africa are actively using AI. Mary’s reaction when she saw that number was instructive: she was surprised it was that high — and immediately qualified what it means. They are using basic AI. Writing assistants. Design tools. ChatGPT for drafting. They are not using AI for workflow automation, agentic deployment, or the more sophisticated applications the technology enables. The industry has adopted AI at the front door. It has not yet built AI into the infrastructure. Glass House PR itself, she said with candid self-awareness, is at baseline too.

From SEO to GEO — and Why It Is Already Happening

Finding 3 in the report — the shift from Search Engine Optimization to Generative Engine Optimization — produced one of the most practically grounded exchanges in the conversation. When you search for the State of PR in Africa on an LLM, the response pulls the 10 key findings directly — because of how the report’s content is structured on the Glass House PR website. Mary noticed this. She is now intentionally writing content to be cited by AI systems rather than ranked by search engines.

I made the point that this is a golden moment for content creators — meaning organizations with genuine content cultures, not just individuals. The brands that have been consistently publishing thought leadership and research will receive a compounding dividend from the GEO era. The brands that rely on advertising spend for visibility are about to discover that paid reach does not translate into AI citations. Mary added a data point that landed: a European PR agency report she had seen was projecting PR budgets increasing from 2027 specifically because of the rising value of thought leadership for LLM citation purposes.

The future belongs to brands with a culture of content. That is what LLMs are ingesting. That is what they cite — Mary Njoki 

The Human Premium — and the Prompting Quality Problem

The most philosophically dense exchange came around the finding that 74.1% of practitioners agree AI enhances but does not replace human creativity and emotional intelligence, while 42.5% of Gen Z students believe AI reduces authenticity. Mary framed the tension cleanly: the question is not whether AI replaces humans. The question is who is the human agent — the person with sound judgment who directs the machine rather than being directed by it. That person, she argues, must be a different kind of human.

I added the mastery dimension: the people who benefit most from AI are those who have done the 10,000 hours. An elite strategist applying AI to their work amplifies excellence. An average practitioner who reaches for AI immediately gets average output at speed but never builds the depth that makes output excellent. Mary put it simply: the quality of your prompt reflects the quality of your thinking. Garbage in, garbage out — AI just makes it more visible.

“The authenticity that comes with originality can never be replaced by AI.” — Mary Njoki

Gen Z, Algorithm Volatility, and Building on Owned Land

On Gen Z: when I raised the “microwave generation” concern — that this cohort wants instant results and is bypassing the foundational hours — Mary pushed back with generosity. Look at what Kenyan Gen Z creators produce on social media. The creativity, the cultural fluency, the speed. They just need direction. Channel that energy into professional-grade work. They are an opportunity, not a problem.

On algorithm volatility: last August, searching for Africa on TikTok surfaced almost exclusively images of sick and hungry children — until external events temporarily shifted the content mix. The platforms have not told anyone how their algorithms work, and the finding that 70.4% of practitioners say algorithm changes disrupted their campaign outcomes in the past year is the daily operational reality of building communications on platforms you do not own or control.

The report’s recommendation to build owned media as core infrastructure is something Glass House PR is living proof of. The thought leadership dividend from the State of PR in Africa Report, Mary said, has repositioned the agency — intellectual authority, a content pipeline, data-informed advisory capability that social media posting cannot match.

The Biggest Frontier: Training AI on African Data

The most forward-looking part of the conversation came when I asked what the 2026 report points towards for 2027 and beyond. Mary’s answer went beyond industry dynamics. The real challenge — and the real opportunity — is not just adopting AI tools. It is feeding African data into those tools. The LLMs that currently define what AI knows about the world were not trained on African data. The algorithms are not calibrated to African contexts. The result is structural bias: AI systems that do not know the accurate story of Africa, that default to deficit narratives, that treat a continent of 54 countries as a monolith.

Changing that requires building AI, not just using it. Training local models. Creating AI agents on African data sets. She quoted a line that stayed with me: it is not about AI leadership. It is about use case studies. If Africa builds the use cases, the tools will follow.

I added the demographic dimension: the Global South is using AI to amplify the human. The Global North is increasingly using it to replace the human. Different context, same technology. With Africa’s median age of 19 and populations growing while Europe, Japan, and China age and decline, the story of who benefits from the AI transition over the next 30 years is not yet written — but the trajectory is becoming clear.

Watch, Listen, and Read

The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify below. The 2026 State of PR in Africa Report is at www.glasshousepr.co.ke/report — read it in full. My analytical breakdown of all 10 key findings is also on this blog post. 

Watch on YouTube: 

Listen on Spotify: