With the rapid developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), discussions about the high-end tech’s potential and its impacts on our daily lives have permeated every sector of our lives and turned a new page on the way we conduct our daily activities.
On Monday, Singapore’s President Tharman, while speaking during the IMF/World Bank 2026 Annual Meetings at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center in Bangkok, said governments across the world should address the pressing issue of how the emergence of AI is dampening jobs and demand for fresh graduates.
Shanmugaratnam challenged global leaders to work hard to avoid a situation where a “new divergence” forms between developing and advanced economies due to disruptions from AI.
“There is a particular problem that we have to address very soon… and that is that the first rung in employment, your first job upon graduation, is now seeing less demand. The evidence is already very clear; it’s clearest in the most AI-exposed sectors,” said the Thai President.
There has been a rising concern about the effectiveness of AI, its pros and cons, and an ongoing conversation on whether this technology will render humanity jobless.
These concerns show a need for people to be educated about AI and how they can embrace it and use it to create employment instead of seeing it as a rival in the industry.
Antony Maina, a Software Engineer says AI has become an inevitable tool in almost all places of work.
Maina attests that from a point of experience he uses AI in every aspect of his work and generally finds it quite helpful.
“When I am doing my work, like in coding and programming, I mostly use AI to speed up my tasks. At the end of the day you find that work which I would have taken an entire week can comfortably be done within a single day,” he explains.
Nevertheless, Maina says AI is an expensive venture to operate owing to the fact that people have to lend out tools like the cloud, ChatGPT and Gemini, often hosted by big companies who lease the software to the public.
He says this infringes on personal security. By leasing tools like ChatGPT, you have to expose your company information to outsiders. If you have an analyst who takes the data and then posts it on ChatGPT which means there is a leakage of your data. Therefore, it’s not really secure when you are giving such kind of information,” he added.
But his worst fear is that AI may end up driving out people from their jobs since it can tackle work meant for five people, something which Jacob Coxon, a former employee of Anthropic, termed as ‘human existential threat..
“It’s purely speculative to say that AI poses a threat to human labour, because we don’t have enough data to confirm that. But looking at the situation now, job opportunities are limited, so if AI takes over, then we will be left with nothing to do,” Maina warns.
He is now calling upon both the government and big companies lending out AI tools to have guardrails and governing systems to enable individuals to use the technology responsibly.
Jacinta Muthoni, who runs a cybershop in Nyeri town, says that AI makes work easier for her, including attending to little corrections such as misspelt words.
Muthoni also employs the use of the technology in tackling tasks that are alien to her.
“If you don’t know something that a customer needs, you just ask AI on how to go about it rather than lose that customer just because you are ignorant. Recently I had a customer who wanted to apply some documents from the Kenya National Highways Authority documents and AI really helped me because it gave me a step-by-step guide on how to do it,” said Muthoni.
But she also fears that soon people may stop visiting her shop for services as more and more people embrace AI in executing tasks that were previously a preserve of cyber cafes.
Be it as it may, others like Ruth Karanja, who runs Geomax Computers, say most business people have resorted to the use of AI to advertise their services to the public.
On the other hand, those who intend to acquire the latest products for use in their companies are now leaning more towards the use of AI due to its versatility as compared to traditional modes like online shopping.
“Today 80 per cent of digital marketing is relying on AI, something which was not the case a few months ago. For instance, if I want to check whether a certain product is marketable, I employ the use of AI, which produces real-time images and posts them online. In this manner I am able to know what stock to purchase instead of having dead stock in my shop,” says Karanaja.
Despite its benefits, Karanja says that it’s almost impossible for this high-end tech to replace humans and their input since AI is not a stand-alone tool.
“True AI will erode some tasks that man is currently doing, but it can’t fully take over everything. For instance, in the event of a cybercrime, we will need men’s input to counter,” she claims.
Rose Gacanja, a local gospel artist, told KNA she had embraced AI in her music production.
However, she fears that at some point she may end up losing out to AI, as most of her audience opt for AI-generated songs instead of conventional ones.
“I am one of those musicians who have sent their original songs to AI to do a cover, and I find the AI cover to be of better quality than the original one. In addition, any time I take the original song to media houses, a number of them opt to use the AI-generated version in place of the original album. This is counterproductive to my music career,” laments Gachanja.
She nevertheless says AI should never be viewed as a threat in totality, especially for gospel artists, since one can still post her AI music cover on social media platforms like TikTok, where people can listen and enquire about the original songs.
On their part, students from institutions of higher learning also expressed that they now want the government to introduce teaching of AI units in schools.
They believe such a concept will not only acquaint learners with the dos and don’ts in the new technology but also adapt it early in order to apply it in tomorrow’s world.
To them, AI is a ripple which started small but will eventually build up into a colossal wave that will overrun every sector of the society as we know it today.
“We have seen that in the music industry AI has already started taking part and is producing cover songs, which is an indicator that some people might lose their jobs. We will embrace it because the world is evolving, but it should not take our jobs, and we will appreciate it if it’s taught as a unit in our schools,” said Peter Musyoki, an ICT student at the Nyeri National Polytechnic.
Others, like Fredrick Mwangangi, a third-year student at Kabarak, argue that despite AI becoming a more indispensable tool of trade, cautious optimism is needed when employing it.
Mwangangi warns that too much reliance on this tool runs the risk of transforming students into zombies who can’t engage in critical thinking and whose output in decision-making on important discourse in the coming days remains uncertain.
“The use of AI depends on which field of study one is pursuing in college. For instance, in some courses like IT, the use of AI is a necessary tool due to programming. Unfortunately, some students are too lazy to apply critical thinking and end up relying too much on it and find themselves without the know-how of handling crucial tasks once they get into formal employment,” he submits.
By Samuel Maina and Silvia Mwangi
