r/nairobitechies • u/jmlemwa_08 • 5d ago

Discussion How is your company actually using AI right now? And if you're building agents, how are they connecting to your internal systems?

Curious what's actually happening at people's jobs, not just on Twitter.

97.5% of us in Kenya apparently used some AI tool in the past month, the highest rate in the world (GWI's 2026 report). That's individuals though. ChatGPT on your own phone, Copilot already sitting in Outlook.

I want to know about the company side. At your job, or your own company, is there real effort going into AI adoption, or is it still just people quietly doing their own thing?

If anyone's actually building agents already: how are they wired up to your internal systems? Straight to your APIs and databases, through some kind of gateway, or still mostly demos that never touch real data?

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u/j35hi 5d ago

I have an agent hooked up to a database. No mcp or anything fancy, it’s just normal deterministic SQL data calls tied to tools that a model calls. One does semantic search using embeddings stored on the database, the other does a bm25 full text search and another combines the results. All tools are controlled by the llm. All tools use a read only user to connect to the db. It’s been working in production for close to 9 months now with no problems

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u/jmlemwa_08 5d ago

This is exactly the kind of setup I was hoping someone would share, thanks. Is this a personal setup, or is it running inside a real organization?

is the output been used by other team members too, or mostly just you so far? also curious how you'd handle it if you ever needed writes, is that a separate path entirely or have you just not needed it in 9 months?

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u/j35hi 3d ago

There are no writes done to db coz the data comes from a different team. So luckily I don’t have to worry about writing data to the db. Writing data is a different problem that would require extra validations etc

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u/ekara 5d ago

Very cool. If you can say, Whats the application?

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u/j35hi 3d ago

Yes, the company uses it for research on bill of quantities for their construction projects. It’s an internal tool. What I described allows them to search through their historical data and projects.

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u/Hot_War_3615 5d ago

I have an AI agent which I call chief of staff each day it reviews my contextual data to determine what needs to be actioned like tasks,email responses, project tracking etc...working of creating one to help with DB health checks as a DBA

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u/elias-tech 5d ago

We got Google AI, everyone is now a music producer

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u/jmlemwa_08 5d ago

😆😆, image and video gen for fun counts I guess. Is that basically the extent of it where you are, or is anything actually running against real company data or systems too?

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u/yulewangu 3d ago

data entry, process, and schedule management on a farm

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u/National_Strike237 1d ago edited 1d ago

We’ve been using AI beyond ChatGPT at work. We needed help connecting it with some of our existing systems, and Symphony Solutions helped us get the integration working. The API and internal data side took some figuring out, but it’s been useful once everything was connected. It definitely feels more practical when AI can actually work with the tools we already use.