Kenya’s Artificial Intelligence Bill, 2026 is still a Senate bill, not law. It had its first reading in April 2026, has not yet cleared committee, and because it touches county government matters it will also need to go through the National Assembly before it can reach presidential assent. Boards do not need to wait for it to find out whether they can simply defer to an algorithm’s output. The existing Companies Act already answers that question, and the answer is no.
Independent judgment does not switch off because a tool is involved
Section 144 of the Companies Act requires a director to exercise independent judgment. Using an AI system to support a decision, credit scoring, hiring recommendations, pricing, risk flagging, is not itself a problem. Treating the system’s output as the decision, rather than as one input a director then actually considers, is where the duty is at risk of being breached. A director who approves whatever the model recommends without engaging their own judgment has arguably delegated a decision the law expects them to personally make.
Reasonable care and skill now includes understanding what the tool actually does
Section 145’s standard of reasonable care, skill and diligence is partly objective and partly tied to what a particular director actually knows. As AI-assisted tools become standard in hiring, lending, and operational decisions, a board that has never asked how a system reaches its recommendations, what data it was trained on, or how often it gets things wrong, is increasingly exposed on this duty. You do not need to be a data scientist to sit on a board that uses these tools, but you do need to have asked the basic questions before relying on the answer.
What the AI Bill would add, if it becomes law
As currently drafted, the Bill proposes a risk-based regime, modelled partly on the EU’s AI Act, with stricter governance, transparency, and record-keeping obligations for higher-risk AI systems, overseen by a proposed Artificial Intelligence Commissioner. Its final shape, and whether it passes in anything like its current form, remains genuinely uncertain given how early it is in the legislative process. Businesses using or planning to use AI systems in decisions that affect customers or employees should track it, but should not wait for it before applying ordinary board-level scrutiny to how those systems are actually used today.
What good oversight looks like right now
A board that can show it discussed how an AI tool is used in a significant decision-making process, understood its basic limitations, and built in a genuine human review step rather than a rubber stamp, is in a materially stronger position than one that adopted a tool and never revisited the decision. That record of active oversight is what section 144 and 145 already expect, regardless of what shape the AI Bill eventually takes.
