Meta’s Kenyan Partners Scale Down to Refocus Core Business Operations

Meta’s main subcontractor for content moderation in east Africa, Sama announced in January 2022 that it would be scaling down. The company let go of 200 employees, amounting to 3% of its team in an attempt to refocus its core business operations.

Sama’s core business is now driven towards providing data annotation solutions for computer vision that power Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models.

On this front and from the Nairobi hub, Sama has expanded its operations and continues to serve leading clients, including 25% of Fortune 50 companies, like GM, Ford, Microsoft, and Google, who trust Sama to help deliver industry-leading ML models.

Global economic players are investing heavily in AI,  investments now estimated to exceed US$2 trillion by 2030. Notably, the AI sector is a growth line for players in the BPO sector, like Sama, as it requires substantial human support to build and validate input data.

Notably, Sama has operated in Kenya for the last 15 years and continues to provide quality formal jobs for Kenyans. Additionally the company also provides value chain AI solutions for self-driving cars, virtual reality gaming consoles, fashion segmentation, and Agricultural solutions for crop disease protection.

As a part of Sama’s vision to continue powering its growth, they recently announced the unveiling of Platform 2.0, a re-engineered computer vision platform to reduce the risk of machine learning (ML) algorithm failures.

The completely redesigned, scalable platform, consisting of SamaIQ™, SamaAssure™, and SamaHub™, offers greater transparency for clients to minimize rework and allows Sama to deliver annotated data and insights three times faster.

Platform 2.0 has achieved a 99% client acceptance rate for AI training data through SamaAssure, the industry’s highest-quality guarantee.

As outlined in the Sama Impact Report 2022, Sama is committed to supporting its people and the planet and advancing responsible AI through partnerships and good governance.

Sama continues to work closely with the Government of Kenya, among other regulators, towards securing the market positioning of the country as a credible international AI and projects to increase this number by 2,500 by next year. This staffing expansion carried out within global ethical and impact jobs benchmarks is inspired by the growing demand for AI-based solutions in the global economy.