Kenya’s technology boom, already fueled by cloud adoption, may be entering an unprecedented financial phase. New data suggests that local systems integrators, consultancies, and AI startups stand to earn dramatically more from services built around Amazon Web Services (AWS) than from the cloud technology itself, a finding that has enormous implications for the future of East Africa’s technology ecosystem.
A study released in December 2025 by US-based research firm Omdia during the ongoing AWS:reInvent summit in Las Vegas, Nevada reveals that partners worldwide can now generate “up to a $7.13 multiplier for every $1 of AWS sold.”
The report, “Partner Ecosystem Multiplier: The AWS Opportunity 2025,” arrived at this conclusion after Omdia conducted in-depth interviews with 35 AWS partners across various geographies and partner types.
The report’s central argument is that in a country where businesses are hungry for resilient infrastructure, automation, and AI-powered customer engagement such as Kenya, the biggest revenue does not come from selling cloud technology. Instead, it flows from the advisory, design, build, adoption, and managed services wrapped around it.
This is precisely where Kenyan firms are positioning themselves, with the research noting, “In the new era of AI, Omdia has forecasted a services opportunity tied to generative and agentic AI of $267 billion by 2030.”
The Shift to AI-First Services
For years, Kenya’s cloud market revolved around foundational migrationsm: oving banks off aging data centers or helping enterprises modernize. But companies across Nairobi’s tech districts are rapidly repositioning for an AI-first world.
The Omdia data validates this business case: the report states bluntly that 82% of AWS partners are now delivering some form of AI as part of their transformation delivery, a seismic shift that mirrors Kenya’s adoption patterns in banking fraud detection, e-commerce recommendation engines, and logistics.
The report emphasizes that the real strategic value for partners lies not in cloud resale but in the long-term services flywheel that accompanies it. The partner multiplier breaks down across six categories: Advise, Design, Procure, Build, Adopt, and Manage, with the largest share coming from Build services (26.9%) and significant portions from Design (18.1%) and Manage (17.8%).
Critically, 61% of this revenue opportunity occurs post-procurement, highlighting that partners thrive when relationships deepen beyond initial cloud adoption.
The New Economics of Kenya’s Cloud
This services-driven multiplier is linked to partner maturity. While Kenya’s market historically skewed toward smaller firms focused on reselling, the market is quickly maturing as banks demand AI-ready architectures and retailers seek predictive inventory engines. Expert partners, those who span all six service categories across the customer lifecycle, earn the full $7.13 multiplier.
The study’s analysis of a typical customer journey shows that while year one is heavily tied to migration and implementation, value shifts dramatically by year three as AI deployments move “from proof of concept to production,” making managed services the heart of the long-term relationship.
For Kenyan AI startups, this gives them ammunition to push for production-grade AI budgets that reward measurable business impact, like reduced fraud losses or improved supply chain visibility.
One recurring theme serves as a caution: “It is important to also highlight that the Multiplier reflects the revenue opportunities that partners can capture with their services and solutions in relation to customer spend on AWS technology, as opposed to margins or profitability.”
The study provides Kenyan partners with the clearest mandate yet to push back against the industry’s perpetual “pilot purgatory.” Many of the country’s most promising AI deployments remain stuck in early-stage trials. It gives partners the ammunition needed to advocate for production-grade AI budgets, pushing deployments beyond proof-of-concept and into long-term, revenue-generating reality.
The most valuable work, the study affirms, lies after migration, in the sustained care and feeding of digital systems that learn, adapt, and grow with the enterprise.