Worth the wait {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? 30 years ago, a Malaysian man named Arsyan Ismail bought the domain AI.com (because it’s his initials) as a teenager, for $100. He just sold it for $70 million. That's 700k ROI, if you’re lucky and can wait 30 years for a payoff. 😄

In Today’s Open Letter

SA healthcare spends as much as R137 million per day on doctor admin, and it’s still eating into off-duty hours – this startup has a plan to cut the pain…

Ever wonder why, when you arrive at the doctor’s at 11:50 for your 12:00 appointment, you’re left sitting in the waiting room till 12:15 before seeing them?

The answer might cure anyone from med school ambitions: Legal risk and outdated practices.

See, doctors operate in one of the most highly regulated industries in the country, where one mistake (read: malpractice suit) can cost them their career and livelihood. They need to keep records of EVERYTHING. And, generally, still with pen and paper or tech from the early 2000s.

The Health Practitioners Council has this absolutely monstrous guide on proper record-keeping.

How bad is it?

Depends on who you ask: Some studies say doctors spend as much as 15 extra hours a week (often after hours) catching up on patient charts and paperwork, others say they only really spend 27% of their day seeing patients and 50% of it on admin. 😬

A lot of SA doctors handle their admin overload with what they call “Pyjama Time”, which is exactly what it sounds like: They use their off-duty and family time to catch up on the mountain of paperwork and admin that stacked up during the day – unpaid, of course.

Yes, but what’s the economic impact?

Well, as many as 78% of medical professionals show signs of burnout.

And, remember, we only have 0.3 doctors per 1’000 people, way short of the WHO’s recommended 2.5 per 1’000. So you’re already sitting with professionals who are supposed to work only 40 hours per week, with a maximum of 20 hours overtime, who are currently working 2–3 times that. 

But it’s even simpler: The average doctor costs providers about R980 per hour in SA, and there are 35k of them, so if they’re spending 50% of an 8-hour day on admin (and not seeing patients), that’s R137 million SA healthcare is losing to doctor admin per day.

Sounds like we need a solution to cut the doc’s paperwork…

The local startup securing Doc’s bedtime

Akili is an ambient AI (read: hidden, unobtrusive recording) tool that captures and documents consultations on the doctor’s behalf, for their review later.

Keeping the human in the loop is important, Akili AI Founder Charles Faul stressed when we caught up with him recently, so they built a smart system that records the consultation and structures the raw data into medical documents the doctor can review and edit afterwards.

Beyond the administrative relief, Charles and team realised that the platform is also positioned to capture and build a richer profile view of each patient. So they’re working on a stealth module that pulls scattered data from a patient’s journey into a clear and navigable overview of their condition/health. And that can be a really cool feature, once commercialised.

Giving doctors a faster way to orient themselves, spot what is missing, and move forward without adding admin? Yes, we’re watching this space.

Need an AI that can actually manage complex projects? Anthropic just launched Claude Opus 4.6, and it instantly took the top spot in AI rankings, coordinating multi-agent workflows and handling massive context windows for serious work. Check it out here.

Did ByteDance just upend the AI video game? TikTok’s creator launched a new video-gen platform called Seedance 2.0, and it looks absolutely insane. Some say it puts everything else to shame, with native audio, lip-synced speech and cinematic 2K generation already being used to produce full short films. Only in China for now, but the international release is expected later in Feb. See more here.

WP finally getting in on the AI game? WordPress has launched a Claude Connector to give secure, read-only access to traffic, comments and performance insights via natural language. Nice! Hope they expand it soon. Discover it here.

SaaS is driving the future of cloud — but scaling it isn’t simple. 

That’s why Cloud On Demand and Brainstorm Magazine are hosting an invitation-only C-Suite Executive Roundtable focused on ISVs, SaaS leaders and scale-ups ready to grow on Azure.

On 25 February, 13:00–16:00 in Johannesburg, you can:

✅ Learn how ISVs are unlocking new revenue streams through Microsoft’s ecosystem
✅ Hear what’s really slowing SaaS growth — and how partnerships fix it
✅ Connect with leaders shaping Africa’s next wave of cloud innovation

If you’re building or scaling a software business, this is where strategy meets real-world execution.

✈️ To The Skies. SA’s biggest airline, Flysafair, has just been acquired by Harith General Partners to expand its infrastructure portfolio. Some critics worry, though, that since the PIC owns 30% of Harith, it effectively gives the government indirect control over 76% of domestic air travel.

🤖 AI Vibe Coder. Remember SimCity? Well, a developer just took OpenAI’s 5.3-codex, pointed it at SimCity’s 37-year-old code, and told it to go to town. Within 4 days, it had the game up and running in a browser after porting the entire C codebase to TypeScript. Wild. Just wild.

⛰️ Mother City Airbnb Fees. The City of Cape Town wants Airbnb owners to pay commercial tax rates (in some cases, a 135% hike). Some people thought it was introducing a new law, but actually, the city says the law was always there; they’re just enforcing it now.

🕯️Burning The Candle With AI. A new study suggests AI tools (and the time they’re freeing up) are increasing pressure, stress and even employer expectations, leading to burnout, but with only a marginal bump in productivity. Sjoe, hey.

🚀 Expansion Enabled. When a small SA autoshop got international clients, the cost of delivering products from SA to overseas was incredibly high. So, SA small business banking specialist Lula helped them get the funds to scale, expand and become a massive SA success.*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

Yesterday, we showed you how Auraa is bringing African AI music mainstream, asking if you’d knowingly add AI Amapiano to your braai playlist. Most say yay…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🔥 If it slaps, it slaps (36%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🚫 No way, I support "real" artists only (24%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🤷 Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even know (24%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎸 It's not a band unless you play an instrument, bro (0)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🥩 Sizzling steak is the only music I listen to when I braai (16%)

Your 2 cents…

Loud and clear, Martin. We send you new topics every day of the week, and because it’s so frequent, we cover a wide range of topics and industries. Did you know there are 100s of systems, tools and tech stories to discover right here?

AI search is scaling fast — but Google still dominates the discovery game.

Daily search behaviour is shifting as AI platforms become discovery engines:

💡 Google still leads with ~8.5B daily searches, but ChatGPT has surged to ~2.5B prompts a day.

💡 AI search isn’t replacing traditional search yet — it’s changing where decisions happen. Research, comparisons and even shopping journeys are moving into conversational interfaces.

💡 For brands and founders, visibility is no longer just SEO; it’s AI-first discoverability.

Structured content, schema markup and conversational answers are becoming the mainstay.

📱 Tool to Try: HEVCut compresses iCloud or iPhone videos so you can reclaim space.

🍁 That’s Interesting: At the 2006 Winter Olympics, a Norwegian coach helped a Canadian skier mid-race. She went on to win a medal because of it, and Canadians were so grateful, they sent the coach five tonnes of maple syrup as a thank-you.

🎺 Next Level: You can’t help but smile along with Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World recreated using 200 leaf cutouts.

☢️ Hack: A visual guide to the different types of radiation.

🧭 Wow Site: WikiCommute will curate a Wikipedia rabbit hole for your precise commute time.