AI
"AI assists. Deterministic rules decide." M-PESA draws the line
Vinod Sharma's rule at WSO2Con Africa was blunt, and the red lines follow from it: AI may not authorise a transaction or execute settlement, may not make irreversible financial decisions alone, must not drive ledger operations, and any autonomous agent gets a defined scope with revocable permissions. The scale explains the caution — over 100 million financial users, billions in daily value, a 99.99% core availability target, and an average transaction touching six to six-and-a-half backend systems. His "Know Your Agent" framework asks of software what KYC asks of people: identity, scope, revocation, audit trail, delegation path, separation of duties. AI gets pattern-spotting, retrieval, fraud flags and credit analysis; the decision stays deterministic and reproducible, because a regulator may reconstruct it years later.
TechTrends KE
GADGETS
Tecno takes two IFA golds — for a 4.9mm modular phone and a mini gaming PC
The modular handset won in ultra-slim magnetic modular technology: 4.9mm thick, which Tecno claims makes it the world's slimmest of its kind, taking up to ten magnetic add-on modules over pogo pins on a 3,000–4,000mAh battery, pitched as a "physical gateway for personal AI assistants". The second gold went to the Tonino Lamborghini Tecno Taurus, a 6.36-litre water-cooled box with an Intel Core i9-13900HK, an RTX 5060 and fifteen ports. Neither has a price or a launch date, and the modular phone is only "entering mass production soon" with no named markets — so for now this is a brand that sells heavily in Kenya winning prizes in Berlin for things Kenyans cannot buy.
TechTrends KE
AI
WSO2Con Africa closes on governance, not models
The first WSO2Con held in Africa spent its Nairobi week arguing that the agentic enterprise is an architecture problem. The "Golden Path" framing sets out how an organisation gets to agents it can actually trust — identity, permissions and observability built in rather than bolted on — and the closing sessions pushed governance out of the model layer and into infrastructure, where authority, security and accountability are enforced. Taken with the ICT Secretary's admission on Wednesday that 22,000 digital services sit on a manual backend, the conference's implicit message to Kenyan institutions was consistent: the interesting work is the integration nobody demos.
TechTrends KE · Techweez
