At the second Safaricom Engineering Summit in 2023, James Macharia was in a team that confronted the challenge: What would an AI-powered digital version of yourself look like?

James loves technology, and his training and passion saw him eventually become a Quality Engineer at Safaricom.

At the summit, also called Decode 2.0, James’ team won the top prize for innovation. Their answer to the challenge at the summit was a ‘Digital Twin’, an AI-powered lifelike human replica complete with voice capabilities.

The idea was to create awareness about deepfakes – images or recordings that have been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.

“Getting the Kenyan accent was a challenge. The voice we cloned had the American accent. So, instead of M-PESA, it kept saying M-Pisa. We kept at it and eventually things aligned, and we were able to demo which was the big moment,” Macharia recalled.

The Decode 2.0 innovators award winning team comprised of James Macharia and Beryl Chepkemoi both from Quality Engineering, Fredrick Mungai from AI and Big Data and Breton Nguru from Automation.

Their prize was a trip to London, where Macharia also ticked an item on his bucket list – a trip to the home ground of Arsenal, his favourite team in the English Premier League.

Speaking on the sidelines of Decode 3.0 earlier this year, James recalled the experience with the technology side of things in London.

“London is a hub of technology. We went to AWS Fulfillment center, and we saw AI robotics, automation and advanced warehouse management at play. We also visited Huawei and Dell offices, and they showed us the next features on AI, cloud computing and the infrastructure. Mind-blowing,” he recalls.

Watch the video below to hear more from James and why he says, “I have seen the power of raising your hand.”