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Across boardrooms worldwide, a familiar conversation is playing out. Executives are under mounting pressure to cut costs, improve efficiency, and demonstrate measurable productivity gains, and artificial intelligence has emerged as their most compelling tool. From automating customer service to streamlining legal research, AI promises to do more with less. The question that rarely makes it onto the management dashboard, however, is: less what, exactly?
The answer, increasingly, is less people.
The displacement of workers by AI is no longer a theoretical concern. It is happening. A 2023 Goldman Sachs report estimated that AI could automate tasks equivalent to 300 million full-time jobs globally. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that while AI will create approximately 170 million new roles by 2030, it will simultaneously displace around 92 million. That is a net gain on paper, but one that masks profound structural disruption underneath.
The new jobs being created, such as AI trainers, prompt engineers, and ethics auditors, are real. But they require skills, education, and access that the displaced factory worker, data entry clerk, or call centre agent may not readily have. The transition is neither automatic nor painless. For millions of workers, the gap between the job lost today and the opportunity promised tomorrow is not a stepping stone. It is a cliff edge.
Sceptics argue that fear of AI-driven job loss is simply the latest chapter in a long history of technological anxiety, from the Luddites resisting mechanised looms to typists fearing the word processor. They point out that every industrial revolution has ultimately created more jobs than it destroyed, lifting living standards in the process.
There is merit in that argument. But there is also a critical difference, and that is the speed of this transition. Previous technological shifts unfolded over decades, giving societies, education systems, and labour markets time to adjust. AI is compressing that timeline dramatically. The question is not whether adaptation is possible. It is whether it can happen fast enough, and for whom.
Here lies the central tension. For a private company, the key performance indicator is profit. Efficiency gains from AI adoption translate directly to shareholder value. There is no column on the balance sheet for displaced livelihoods, eroded communities, or the psychological toll of unemployment.
This is not an argument against profit. It is an argument about who bears responsibility for the externalities of technological adoption. When businesses optimise for productivity and governments optimise for GDP growth, the individual worker stripped of their livelihood can fall through the gap between both.
There is a deeper principle worth stating plainly. Work is not merely an economic transaction. People derive identity, purpose, and dignity from their ability to earn, provide, and contribute. A society in which productivity soars while the capacity of ordinary people to sustain themselves and their families collapses is not a successful one, regardless of what the aggregate numbers suggest. The moral aim of economic progress should be the delivery of value to society, not the maximisation of returns for the few.
Policymakers around the world are beginning to grapple with these realities. The European Union's landmark AI Act, which came into force in 2024, established a risk-based framework for regulating AI systems, with particular attention to high-risk deployments in employment, education, and essential services. Several US states have introduced legislation requiring algorithmic impact assessments for hiring tools. China has moved to regulate generative AI and recommendation algorithms. The regulatory momentum is unmistakable.
The concerns driving this legislative wave extend beyond job displacement. They encompass the spread of AI-generated misinformation, threats to data privacy and cybersecurity, the erosion of personal dignity through non-consensual synthetic media, and the concentration of AI's benefits among a narrow technological elite.
Kenya is not standing on the sidelines. In February 2026, Senator Karen Nyamu introduced the Artificial Intelligence Bill, 2026, a comprehensive framework that positions Kenya among the first African nations to legislate directly on AI governance. Drawing significantly from the EU AI Act, the Bill takes a structured, risk-based approach to regulating AI systems across both the public and private sectors.
On the question of jobs specifically, the Bill makes several meaningful interventions. Any provider or deployer of an AI system likely to impact employment is required to conduct a workforce impact assessment before deployment, explicitly including an evaluation of potential job displacement. Mitigation measures, including reskilling programmes developed in collaboration with national and county government agencies, are mandatory and not optional.
The Bill also establishes an Office of the Artificial Intelligence Commissioner, tasked with developing guidelines on workforce transition, including partnerships for vocational training and incentives for AI adoption that actively creates jobs rather than simply eliminating them. The Advisory Committee, which advises the Commissioner, is specifically mandated to recommend strategies for workforce reskilling in response to AI-induced changes. This is a clear signal that human transition, not just technological compliance, is a core concern of the framework.
Beyond employment, the Bill addresses the broader harms associated with AI. It mandates transparency and disclosure obligations for automated decision-making systems, prohibits AI systems that pose unacceptable risks to society, criminalises the non-consensual use of a person's image or likeness in AI-generated content, and requires high-risk systems in sectors like healthcare, finance, and public administration to undergo rigorous human rights impact assessments.
Legislation alone will not resolve the tension between AI adoption and human welfare. But it is a necessary foundation. Kenya's AI Bill signals an important acknowledgement, which is that the benefits of artificial intelligence do not distribute themselves, and that without deliberate governance, the costs will fall disproportionately on those least able to bear them.
The private sector's race to productivity is rational. It is also insufficient as a guiding principle for society. As AI reshapes the nature of work, the critical challenge for governments, businesses, and communities alike is to ensure that efficiency gains are not achieved at the expense of human dignity, and that the people displaced by the machines of tomorrow are not simply left behind.
Kenya has made a start. Whether the law translates into practice will depend on political will, institutional capacity, and above all, a sustained commitment to the idea that people, not productivity metrics, are the true measure of progress.
The Artificial Intelligence Bill, 2026 is currently before the Kenya Senate.
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