Amazon CEO Matt Garman/HANDOUT
Kenya’s cloud and artificial intelligence boom may be entering its most consequential phase yet, as new data suggests local consultancies, AI startups and systems integrators stand to earn dramatically more from Amazon Web Services (AWS) than previously understood.
A study by US-based research firm Omdia reveals that AWS partners worldwide can now generate “up to a $7.13 (Sh900) multiplier for every $1 (Sh130) of AWS sold,” a figure with enormous implications for East Africa’s technology ecosystem.
The report, titled "Partner Ecosystem Multiplier: The AWS Opportunity 2025," was released on the sidelines of the AWS: Re-Invent event in Las Vegas, Nevada, which kicked off on December 1 and ends on December 5.
It reached this conclusion after Omdia conducted in-depth interviews with 35 AWS partners across various geographies and partner types.
The report’s central argument is blunt: in a region where businesses are hungry for automation, resilient infrastructure, and AI-powered customer engagement, the biggest revenue doesn’t come from selling cloud technology itself.
Instead, it comes from the advisory, design, build, adoption, and managed services wrapped around it, the same areas where Kenyan firms have sought to differentiate themselves.
“In the new era of AI, Omdia has forecasted a services opportunity tied to generative and agentic AI of $267 billion by 2030,” the research notes, positioning partners as the engines of this expansion.
With Kenya’s financial institutions, telcos, and public agencies accelerating cloud migrations, the findings sharpen the conversation about who will capture the next decade of revenue.
Kenyan companies already recognize the shift.
For years, Kenya’s cloud market has revolved around foundational migrations: moving banks off aging data centres, helping enterprises modernize digital infrastructure, or building customer-facing platforms with elasticity and scale.
But companies across Nairobi’s tech districts, from Westlands to Upper Hill to Ngong Road, are now repositioning their services for an AI-first world. The Omdia numbers help make the business case.
The report states bluntly that 82 per cent of AWS partners are now delivering some form of AI as part of their transformation delivery, a seismic shift that mirrors Kenya’s adoption pattern: AI chatbots in banking, machine learning in fraud detection, recommender engines in e-commerce, and predictive analytics in agriculture and logistics.
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to be the market-leading provider of public cloud infrastructure in terms of market share. For customers to unlock the full opportunities of AI in their public cloud environments, they lean on a wide variety of services and expertise from their technology providers, specifically the partners within the AWS Partner Network.”
For Kenyan partners, this means that the real revenue and strategic value lie not in cloud resale but in the flywheel of services that accompany it.
A multiplier built on services, not software.
To quantify the opportunity, the report says, “Omdia conducted a PEM study in the AWS Partner Network. The PEM represents the incremental revenue partners can capture for every $1 of AWS technology sold.”
The largest share of this partner multiplier comes from Build services (26.9%), followed by Design (18.1%), Manage (17.8%), and Adopt (16.3%). Importantly, 61% of the PEM opportunity occurs post-procurement, indicating that partners thrive when relationships deepen beyond initial cloud adoption.
For Kenyan AI startups building models for retail, manufacturing automation, fintech risk engines, or health diagnostics, this shift is a strategic tailwind. Kenya’s most competitive firms are already selling “adoption” and “manage” services, long-term revenue layers that enterprises increasingly insist on as they scale AI from pilots into production.
The report identifies four maturity categories within the AWS partner landscape: Focused, Multi-category, Progressive, and Expert. Each category expands revenue potential as partners engage more deeply across the customer lifecycle.
Kenya’s cloud market historically skewed toward the first two categories, smaller cloud integrators and MSPs focused on reselling, migrations, or security hardening.
But the market is maturing fast. Banks now demand AI-ready architectures. Retailers want predictive inventory engines. Fintechs seek global-scale reliability. Startups want cost-effective MLOps pipelines.
This shift mirrors Omdia’s global analysis. Expert partners, those spanning all six service categories, earn the full multiplier of $7.13.
“Partners that achieve this multiplier provide a breadth of services across the customer lifecycle, guiding customers through complex digital transformations and leveraging their position to drive solutions tied explicitly to business outcomes.”
In Kenya, that’s where the real opportunity lies: firms that can link cloud deployments to measurable business value, reduced fraud losses, improved supply chain visibility, faster deployment cycles, or lower customer churn stand to become the region’s most influential tech players.
The report’s three-year modeling of what it calls typical customer journeys deepens that insight. In year one, nearly half the revenue is tied to advisory, migration and implementation.
But by year three, the report notes, value shifts dramatically as AI deployments move “from proof of concept to production,” and managed services become the heart of the partner relationship. In Kenya, that’s a particularly important signal.
Many of the country’s AI deployments are still early-stage, often trapped in endless pilot cycles. The Omdia data gives partners ammunition to push harder for production-grade AI, for budgets that extend beyond pilot projects, and for business-outcome contracts that reward measurable impact.
One recurring theme in the study may resonate more quietly in Kenya than the headline figures. Omdia repeatedly emphasizes that the multiplier reflects revenue opportunities, not profit margins.
“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.”
In Kenya’s competitive services market, where pricing pressure is real and staff retention remains difficult, that caution matters. Revenue is not the same as sustainability.
The companies that thrive will be those that balance growth with margins and invest in senior technical talent who can command premium enterprise contracts.
Another insight in the report carries weight in Kenya’s fast-changing enterprise landscape:
“The Manage and Build categories are the largest growing categories… driven by the growth of the role of AWS Marketplace and the growth of opportunity tied to generative and agentic AI.”
Local firms, many of which have begun listing their software or integrations on AWS Marketplace, are finding that marketplace visibility shortens sales cycles and widens their addressable market far beyond East Africa.
For firms with proprietary models or workflow automations, Marketplace is becoming part of their go-to-market architecture.
Kenya’s top partners are already moving in that direction. Some are building domain-specific AI agents for insurance, agriculture, payments and logistics. Others are investing in customer-success units designed to track business KPIs over the life of a contract.
Nearly all are positioning their firms as strategic advisors capable of guiding clients through the uncertainties of AI regulation, data localization, and workforce transformation.
The study’s broader narrative hints at a deeper shift: cloud is no longer the business. Transformation is. And in Kenya, where the hunger for automation, efficiency and data-driven insight is rising across industries, the timing could not be better.
The report affirms that the most valuable work lies after migration, in the sustained care and feeding of digital systems that learn, adapt and grow. It quantifies opportunities that many Kenyan firms sensed but could not articulate. Yet it also sets a high bar for what counts as maturity.
The sevenfold multiplier is not simply a reward for selling more cloud. It is a marker of depth in advisory, in architecture, in AI, and in the ability to stay with customers long after the initial excitement fades.
