The Kenyan government is building a unified operations platform to link public institutions' systems through secure application programming interfaces (APIs), as it prepares to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) agents in public service delivery.
ICT and digital Economy principal secretary Eng. John Tanui said the next phase of Kenya's digitisation drive will focus on the backend, enabling government systems to communicate, share data securely and coordinate services across institutions.
"Kenya has made significant progress through platforms such as eCitizen. Our next frontier is the backend," Tanui said, in a speech read on his behalf by Mary Kerema, secretary for ICT, Digital Economy and Emerging Technologies, at the WSO2Con Africa 2026 conference in Nairobi on Wednesday.
The shift targets the fragmentation that has seen different ministries and agencies run separate systems, often forcing citizens to navigate multiple offices and portals for a single service.
"A citizen should not need to understand government architecture to access a public service. The experience should be simple, unified and centred on the outcome they need," Tanui said.
The plan will be anchored on an Enterprise Platform designed to orchestrate data and services across government.
Tanui said the state is also moving towards agentic AI — systems that can pursue set goals and act on their own within defined limits, rather than simply responding to instructions.
He said: "The shift is from software that waits for instructions to systems that can pursue authorised outcomes."
He cautioned, however, that adopting such systems must be matched by safeguards on trust, accountability and security, noting that human judgement remains essential even as AI takes on analysis and decision support.
Tanui said Zero Trust — a security approach that treats every user and system as unverified by default — must become a foundational principle for autonomous AI in government, requiring clear rules on data access, authorisation of actions, audit trails, error handling and escalation to human officers.
"The objective is not simply to automate government tasks, but to redesign operations around intelligence and deliver better outcomes for citizens," he said.
Tanui said combining computing capacity, trusted data, secure APIs, AI and local language technologies would help Kenya overcome legacy constraints and build a more responsive, transparent and efficient government.
The three-day WSO2Con Africa conference, hosted by software firm WSO2 at the JW Marriott Nairobi, ran under the theme "Building the Agentic Enterprise."
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