I had the opening panel at Glovo Kenya’s Future of Commerce Summit on yesterday morning, and I could not have asked for three better-matched panelist to discuss the future of digital commerce in Kenya from their respective perspectives. 

Willy Kimani left the biggest supermarket chain in the country to build Jaza Supermarket, a neighborhood affordable supermarket chain, in the estates. Anne Kinuthia-Otieno spent five years building Airtel Money Kenya and is only a few months into running Visa across East Africa. Jacques Theunissen has turned Kuku Foods, the KFC franchisee for the region, from a loss-making business of 30 restaurants into one of more than 70. 

Three businesses, one Kenyan consumer, and three different answers to what it takes to be built to win when it comes to the future of digital commerce in Kenya. What follows is what I heard from the moderator’s chair; and you can also watch or listen to the full recording via YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts on the Pure Digital Passion Podcast.

The Customer Who Wanted Her Shopping Carried To Her Car. 

I opened by asking each of them for a moment when a customer showed them, through what they did rather than what they said, that the way they shop had changed. Willy’s answer went back to his Tuskys days at the Pioneer branch in the city centre. A customer, having been served and packed at the till, turned to the staff and asked, in effect, who was thinking about how she got the shopping from the till to her car. “Yes, you have packed and served, but are you thinking about how I’m getting this product from the till all the way outside?”.

The following Monday, by his account, Tuskys began putting permanent packers in every store in the country, a service that was later outsourced and that most supermarkets copied. It was a reminder that the oldest digital commerce lesson, remove the friction after the sale, was learned in Kenyan retail long before anyone had an app.

Anne’s moment was her eighteen-year-old son, bound for school abroad, who waved away the two days of shopping she had planned and ordered the list himself from his bank account overseas, delivered to the door, on a Visa card. “That’s business for you,” she said. Jacques’s moment was 2020. KFC had been delivering in Kenya since the days of Hello Food, long before it was a thing, but the pandemic taught him the word everyone uses is the wrong one. “We talk about convenience, but convenience actually is time.” 

Customers will have less of it as the world speeds up, so a brand must be present at every occasion where the customer wants it: the drive-through on the way home, the sofa, the school run. Occasions, he argued, are becoming more important than the offer itself, and if it had not been for e-commerce in those years KFC Kenya would not have been able to trade at all.

The Gap Between The Kiosk & The Hypermarket In Kenya

Willy’s account of where Jaza Supermarket came from went further back than I expected, to Uchumi. The chain, he reminded us, was founded in the Late President Jomo Kenyatta’s era with the idea of Kenyan goods on every street corner, and for a while it had the small, local stores that did what was needed: Nairobi West, Jogoo Road, City Square. That idea died as the hypermarkets rose, but the need it served did not. 

“I want my milk and bread quickly, in and out. I’ll go at month-end for my vanilla-scented candle and my baking things. But milk, bread, diapers, soap: that was the gap.” People did not want to buy those things in a kiosk or a wholesaler either; they wanted a little comfort, a quick pack, in and out, and they wanted it at a price similar to or lower than the supermarket. 

He had studied the numbers at Tuskys Chap Chap and at Naivas Kangemi, small-format stores with minimal operating cost and high volume, and the model justified itself. By his count Jaza is now the fourth or fifth largest player in Nairobi, with the 34th store opening in Umoja as we spoke.

Why Jaza Sells On WhatsApp, Not An App

The question I most wanted answered was why a 34-store chain takes online orders on WhatsApp rather than an app of its own, and Willy’s answer was the most Kenyan thing said on the stage all day. The ordinary Kenyan customer, he said, is not in the room at the Radisson. His phone was bought for five to seven thousand shillings, he saved for it, and there is no space on it for another app. 

He has WhatsApp, his banking app, and one social network, probably TikTok; “Insta is for the Westlands.” So the question for a new supermarket is whether to build an app the customer cannot fit on his phone, or to plug into the channel where everyone is already selling, the colleague selling handbags in the school group, the friend listing an Airbnb. Jaza plugged in: a WhatsApp number, a link, an order, an M-Pesa prompt, done.

The second half of his answer was about what not to build. Partners like Glovo think about apps and delivery every single day, and Jaza is too small and too concentrated in Nairobi to compete with that investment, so it rents it. Behind the simple WhatsApp front end, he said, sits a surprising amount of integration back into the ERP, and he claimed, with some pride, to be the first or second retailer to have done a direct API integration with Glovo, mainly to cut the cancellations that come from missed orders. 

When an audience member asked whether online sales were cannibalizing his stores, his answer was that e-commerce is still single digits of sales but entirely incremental: in Utawala, where parking is a constraint, delivery captures a customer who would otherwise be lost; inside Nyayo Estate the online share is so high that Jaza bought two e-bikes to serve it; at Greatwall Gardens it is far lower. His word for digital was “enabler”. It widens the pool.

Kiosks, Drive-Throughs & The 10% To 30% Basket

Jacques is the operator in Kenya who has gone furthest on in-store technology, and the self-service digital kiosks that KFC introduced in 2023 came with a number. “We’ve seen on self-service kiosks anywhere between a 10 and 30 per cent increase in average basket size,” because a Gen Z or Gen Alpha customer wants control, and the easiest way to give it is to let them build the order themselves rather than be steered to a bundle at the counter. 

The surprise was geography. The expectation was that self-service digital kiosks would be a young, urban phenomenon; the reality is that uptake in Kakamega has matched Westlands. East Africans, he said, adopt technology faster than almost anywhere else he has worked, and he thinks the region will outgrow the rest of the continent on technology and commerce as a result.

All of KFC’s channels are growing at once. Going to a restaurant used to be an event that happened once a month; today there are customers who order breakfast, lunch and dinner on the same day, and if he is not available at each of those moments the sale goes to whoever is. Yet the same digital-native customer still wants human interaction and still comes into the restaurant, so the formats vary with the neighbourhood: some restaurants mostly delivery, some with small seating, some with large. 

His three rules for a brand to exist today were worth writing down. Be relevant, to every consumer and not only Gen Z. Be easy to access, which means where you build as much as which apps you are on. And be distinctive, because people want innovation and excitement from a brand or they stop using it. 

When I told him that KFC had gone from a special occasion, the first thing I did as a young man arriving in Sandton in South Africa for the very first time many years ago was walk to the KFC down the road, to something close to a utility in Nairobi, his reply was that the whole recipe is making every transaction, digital or in-store, feel as special as that first visit, because “the moment you lose the special, you lose your brand.”

Cards You Leave At Home: Anne On Tokenization 

Anne has watched the Kenyan consumer from a bank, from a mobile money business and now from a digital payments network, and her account of the change was a history in three acts. People used to dress up to go to the bank; it was a ceremony. Then banking left the branch for the app and USSD. Then mobile money made Kenya a digital payments country before most of the world, and card usage among the mass affluent is now high. 

Now, she said, the card is an accompaniment to the phone, and the work at Visa is to make it something you can leave at home: tokenize it, tap the phone, and never type a sixteen-digit number, an expiry date and a CVV into a checkout form again. Her explanation of tokenization was the clearest I have heard in a long time: a token is a casino chip. It stands in for your money inside the building, and it is worthless to anyone who walks out with it. Her challenge to businesses was that as the payment experience improves, the shopping experience has to keep pace, from the first tap on the platform to a refund that arrives when the order is wrong.

On why small businesses stay in cash, she was candid that cash is expensive, in fraud and in security, and that a young population with a median age of 21 is not going to walk to a supermarket when it can shop on WhatsApp, TikTok and Instagram. For those businesses she had two practical offers. 

Visa Accept turns a bank’s own app into a payment terminal, so a trader who could never afford a point-of-sale machine can accept cards, see their transaction history, and, because the bank sees it too, be offered an overdraft timed to the days of the month when their sales peak. 

Visa Pay, offered as a software kit a bank can drop into its existing app, gives a virtual card, digital onboarding and cross-border payments to any bank that finds building its own too slow or too expensive; in markets like the DRC, Visa has launched it as a standalone app. 

I added a point from my recent podcast session with Glovo Kenya’s Caroline Mutuku the week before: a weekly digital payment from a marketplace like Glovo gives a single-outlet restaurant, like the fish-and-ugali place I visited with Founder Oscar Pierre in 2021, a financial history it never had in cash, and that history is what a lender needs to say yes. Anne agreed, and the credit perspective became one of the main threads of our conversation. 

Integration, Copilot & The Fastest Payback

Asked which technology investment paid back fastest, Jacques listed what KFC has built over the last few years, forecasting, optimal ordering for working capital, daily success routines for managers and area coaches, an ERP, and then said the investment only paid when the systems talked to each other. 

“There’s no use having five, six, seven different systems. The payback comes when they’re all integrated and I have live data available. I can ask Copilot any question within the ERP about what’s happening at the restaurants right now.” The fastest single payback, he said, was the self-service digital kiosks, which have grown faster than anticipated and in places nobody expected. It was the moment Willy’s API integration and Anne’s seamless checkout aligned perefctly. 

Agentic Commerce & The Trust Layer 

The audience questions were quite candid! One asked Anne why Kenyan banking apps are so poor next to an app like Glovo’s, and her answer, that Visa is “a network of networks” that improves the payment layer while the look and feel of the app is the bank’s own job, was softened by the Visa Pay SDK as the remedy for a bank that cannot build. 

The last question, from a business already watching customers log into its website through ChatGPT and let the assistant fill in the order, asked what Visa is doing about agentic commerce. Anne cited a Visa study in which 89 per cent of customers surveyed said they would use an AI agent to shop for them, but only 29 per cent said they would trust the agent to complete the checkout. 

The gap is trust at the moment of payment, and the answer she described, pointing to Meta’s newly launched Muse agent as an example of where this is going, is a tokenized card created for a single transaction, usable once and never again, so that an agent can be handed the authority to pay without being handed the card. 

Visa has partnered with Stripe and the agentic commerce companies on exactly this layer. Her phrase for Visa’s role, “the trust layer”, was the one I closed the session on. It helps that Kenya is the most AI-engaged country in the world: DataReportal’s mid-year Digital 2026 report puts 97.5 per cent of Kenyan internet users on at least one AI tool every month, first of 54 countries.

Digital Commerce In Kenya In The Year 2030: Drones, Integration & People

I closed with the discussion with following common question: Name the one capability a business must start building in the next twelve months to still be winning in 2030, not a technology, not a budget, a decision someone could take immediately. Willy, to laughter and then applause, said drones delivering milk, bread and essentials into gated neighbourhoods. 

Anne said integration for a better customer experience, so that a shopper knows every checkout is safe, secure and trusted. Jacques agreed on integration and then gave the answer I think the room will remember: “Start investing right now in the people who will get the best out of your technology over the next five years. Technology is only as good and as effective as the people in your business driving it.”

Ultimately, What Does The Future of Digital Commerce Look Like In Kenya?

Three people, three business models, and from where I was sitting it was striking how often they said the same thing from different viewpoints. Be where the occasion is, whether that is a drive-through on Mombasa Road, a WhatsApp number in Utawala or a tokenized card inside an AI agent. 

The Kenyan constraint, on this evidence, is not appetite; Jaza’s Nyayo Estate numbers, KFC’s self-service digital kiosks in Kakamega and Caroline Mutuku’s outskirts data from her keynote all say the demand is already here. The constraint is the smartphone in the customer’s hand and the price on the shelf, and the businesses winning are the ones designing for a five-thousand-shilling smartphone and a month-end budget rather than for the Westlands early adopter.

The word that came up most was integration, and I suspect it is the real answer to the panel’s title. A business built to win in Kenya’s digital commerce future is not the one with the most channels. It is the one whose channels, systems and data are integrated well enough that a customer gets the same experience at the counter, on WhatsApp and inside an agent, and whose people know how to run it. Jacques said that last part best, and he runs the business that has had to learn it the hard way.

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