Sama, a leading provider of data annotation solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) models, has confirmed its plans to enhance its Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) investments in Kenya.

The company, which has been operating in the country since 2011, aims to leverage Kenya’s skilled workforce, competitive operational costs, and favourable business environment to deliver global solutions.

Sama Vice President of Global Delivery, Annepeace Alwala, said the firm has expanded its service offering to include data annotation solutions, which are in high demand by more than 25 per cent of Fortune 50 companies.

“In Kenya, thanks to quality talent, Sama, is today a key player in the data annotation market providing best-in-class computer vision data labelling services. These services are delivered under the Sama data curation, annotation and validation business lines which we deliver for more than 25 per cent of Fortune 50 companies who trust Sama to help them deliver industry-leading Machine Learning models,” Alwala said.

She added that the local BPO industry is growing at a steady rate and is expected to create more than one million jobs and generate more than $400 million USD in revenue.

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“This makes the industry an important economic player with contemporary global solutions provision capacity,” she said.

Sama’s plans are supported by the government’s policies and investment in infrastructure, which are attracting several international companies seeking to establish operations in Africa.

Sama's Chief Executive Officer, Wendy Gonzalez, said that Kenya has the potential to become a major player in the global BPO market and that Sama is excited to be a part of this growth.

“For over a decade, we have provided individuals who are most likely to be excluded from formal sector jobs. Through our purposeful impact hiring process, we connect individuals from low-income backgrounds, those who didn’t have the opportunity to pursue education beyond secondary school, and those who, prior to joining Sama, lived in extreme poverty with fair paying entry-level jobs,” Gonzalez said.

Sama offers a range of BPO services, including data validation, data curation, image and video annotation, content moderation, customer service support, data entry, software development, and 3D Point Cloud annotation for a variety of industries, such as autonomous transportation, MedTech, agriculture, and retail solutions.

The company employs over 3,000 people from Kenya and other African countries and focuses on annotating data for AI algorithms by providing computer vision solutions that power AI and machine learning models.