Just over a year after launching, This Is Digital has turned an ambitious AI literacy thesis into a growing training business and a landmark partnership with Meta. My impromptu podcast conversation with co-founders Grace Murugi and Greg Wanjama revealed what they have learned about Kenya’s AI opportunity, where the hype ends, and what serious adoption requires.

Last week, I attended a hands-on Claude workshop delivered by This Is Digital in collaboration with Isaac Hunja of KaaraWorks. I arrived thinking I was a fairly advanced AI user. I have been using these tools extensively, writing about them, training teams, and encouraging organisations to take the opportunity seriously.

I still left the room feeling that I had work to do.

The session moved beyond the basic prompting that has defined much of the first phase of generative AI adoption. We worked through Claude connectors, skills, and agents, and the difference was immediately clear. Asking an AI tool to produce an answer is one thing. Giving it the context, instructions, access, workflow, and guardrails to perform a repeatable business task is something else entirely.

The lesson was both humbling and encouraging. Agentic AI can be remarkably powerful, but useful systems do not appear simply because someone clicks a few buttons. The work is front-loaded. You have to understand the task, document the process, provide the right context, and decide where human judgement must remain in the loop.

Immediately after the workshop, I asked Grace Murugi, the co-founder and Chief AI Strategist at This Is Digital, whether she and her fellow co-founder and CEO, Greg Wanjama, would be willing to sit down for an episode of my Pure Digital Passion podcast. It was entirely impromptu. They agreed, the production team moved quickly, and within minutes we were recording.

The timing could hardly have been better.

A Full-Circle Conversation

This Is Digital had recently passed its first anniversary. I had been present at the start of that journey in July 2025, when I delivered the keynote address at the organisation’s launch in Nairobi.

That presentation looked at the past, present, and future of Kenya’s digital transformation. I went back to the early days of analogue Internet connections, dial-up modems, Africa Online, and the period when convincing organisations to build a website felt like frontier work. I then traced the arrival of mobile, M-PESA, undersea fibre-optic cables, smartphones, social media, e-commerce, digital lending, and the innovation ecosystem that came to be known as the Silicon Savannah.

The point was not nostalgia. It was context.

Every major technological transition looks obvious in hindsight and uncertain while it is happening. Kenya’s AI moment has the same quality. The potential is enormous, but so are the questions about skills, governance, local relevance, data sovereignty, ownership, and whether Africa will create value or simply provide low-cost labour to somebody else’s value chain.

At the launch, Grace and Greg had a striking level of conviction about the need for practical AI literacy. A little over a year later, that conviction has translated into more than 800 professionals trained, more than 40 organizations served, a growing range of programmes, and an important new partnership with Meta.

A Company Built With AI, Not Merely Around It

One of the most interesting parts of our conversation was learning that This Is Digital is not simply a conventional training company teaching AI. It was built as an AI-native business.

Grace explained that one of the exercises that shaped the original idea involved uploading her CV and the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report into Claude. She then asked it to analyse her experience against the emerging needs identified in the report and recommend the kind of company she could build to prepare Kenya for the future.

The answer was an AI literacy company.

That suggestion did not become a business by itself. Grace and Greg had already noticed something happening around them. Friends and professional contacts were inviting them for coffee, opening their laptops, and asking for help with ChatGPT and other AI tools. The founders treated those informal consultations as a market signal, conducted additional research, tested whether people would pay for structured training, and then made the unusually bold decision to launch publicly and loudly.

AI helped frame the thesis, but human judgement and market validation turned it into a business.

That distinction matters because it reflects one of Greg’s most important observations during the podcast: AI is an accelerator, not a magic bullet. If a business model is weak, adding AI does not suddenly make it sound. If the target customer is unclear, the revenue model is broken, or the underlying process makes little sense, automation may simply help the organisation make the same mistakes faster.

This Is Digital uses AI across curriculum development, research, administration, content planning, business analysis, and internal workflows. The founders have also built specialised agents to handle specific tasks. Greg’s advice is practical: do not try to build one agent that does everything. Build a collection of focused agents, each with a clear responsibility, relevant context, and defined operating procedure.

That is less glamorous than the demonstrations that dominate social media. It is also much closer to how useful technology gets adopted inside real organizations.

Kenya’s AI Adoption Is High, But Depth Still Matters

Kenya frequently appears in conversations about enthusiastic adoption of generative AI. Grace and Greg’s experience on the ground adds important texture to that story.

Greg sees a great deal of hype. Many users have moved their basic searches from Google to ChatGPT without fundamentally changing how they work. Some have paid subscriptions to several leading AI platforms but have not developed the context, prompting discipline, privacy awareness, or workflow design required to extract meaningful value from any of them.

The same pattern is now appearing around AI agents. Everybody wants one, but relatively few people appreciate what it takes to build an agent that can operate reliably. An agent needs something close to a job description. It needs instructions, permissions, boundaries, examples, and standard operating procedures. It must also be tested and reviewed.

The good news, as I learned during the Claude workshop, is that much of the hardest work is done at the beginning. Once the system has been designed properly and improved through repeated use, the benefits can compound.

Grace described two broad groups of learners. The first arrives skeptical and sometimes openly challenges the trainers to prove that AI is useful. Some of those same skeptics later become the strongest advocates for the programme. The second group arrives curious and quickly begins applying the tools to its work.

She shared examples of learners who used AI to create new services, improve content production, automate social media workflows, and dramatically reduce the time required for research. The common factor was not passive access to a chatbot. It was the decision to apply AI to a specific professional capability and create something useful from it.

The Skills That Will Matter Most

The podcast repeatedly returned to a question that is larger than any single tool: what will differentiate people when access to powerful AI becomes widely available?

Greg’s answer was critical thinking. If two people can access the same models, the advantage moves to the person who can understand a problem, break down a process, supply the right context, test the output, and turn it into value for a customer or organisation.

Grace added adaptability. Intelligence and emotional intelligence remain important, but the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn may become the defining professional advantage of the next few years. The change is not coming. It is already here.

This connected directly with the message in my keynote at the This Is Digital launch. Africa cannot afford to remain only a consumer of imported AI systems or a supplier of low-cost labour within the global AI economy. We need deeper technical capability, stronger governance, locally relevant applications, and many more people who can use AI to solve real African problems.

From A One-Year-Old Business To Meta’s AI Training Partner

The biggest news in our conversation was This Is Digital’s selection as Meta’s AI training partner in Kenya.

The partnership will deliver AI Academy Kenya, a flagship capacity-building programme designed to equip Kenyan students, professionals, small business owners, startups, and developers with practical AI skills. The initiative combines a startup Pitchathon with a sponsored eight-week online Masterclass and is expected to upskill 300 participants from across Kenya.

For a young Kenyan organisation, this is a significant milestone. It validates the work This Is Digital has done during its first year, but it also gives the team a larger platform on which to test its ambition of helping one million Africans acquire practical AI skills.

The Pitchathon is open to Kenyan startups, developers, and teams building an early-stage idea or working product using Meta’s AI technologies. Ten successful applicants will be invited to pitch live in Nairobi. The top two winners will each receive US$5,000 in equity-free funding, Meta advertising credits, and an invitation to attend Meta’s Regional AI Summit in Istanbul in November 2026.

Pitchathon applications close on 30 September 2026.

The AI Academy Kenya Masterclass is a sponsored eight-week online programme for Kenyan students, startup founders, developers, and career professionals. It will cover AI fundamentals and prompt engineering, research and knowledge work, creative AI, documents and communication, audio and video, productivity and workflow automation, and responsible AI, governance, and ethics.

The Masterclass begins on 3 November 2026, runs on Tuesday evenings, and has 300 places. Applications close on 15 October 2026.

This Is Only The Beginning

My biggest takeaway from the workshop and podcast is that Kenya does not have an AI awareness problem. People have heard the message. The harder task is helping individuals and organisations move from experimentation to disciplined application.

That means teaching people to think critically about what they are trying to achieve, to protect sensitive information, to challenge the model instead of accepting every answer, and to build workflows grounded in the reality of their organizations. It also means judging AI by the value it creates, not by the novelty of the output.

This Is Digital’s first year offers a useful case study. The founders used AI to help identify and analyze an opportunity, but they also validated the market, created a curriculum, built operating systems, trained real people, listened to the results, and kept refining the model. The Meta partnership is not the beginning of that work. It is evidence of the work already done.

If you are building with Meta’s AI technologies, the Pitchathon offers funding, visibility, and access to a wider innovation ecosystem. If you are a student, founder, developer, or professional seeking practical AI skills, the Masterclass offers a sponsored route into a structured eight-week programme.

Apply for AI Academy Kenya here: https://thisisdigital.ai/meta-ai-academy-kenya

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