Talk and drive {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Anthropic has announced that Claude is now available on Apple CarPlay, letting you engage with the agent while commuting. People have already started playing around with it, and, gotta say, it's pretty wild. 🚀

In Today’s Open Letter

OpenAI’s economic research division just released a report on how the world used ChatGPT this year – and the SA data is in…

South Africa is once again a hard worker, ranking 4th in the world for the most work-related messages sent to ChatGPT in 2026: 40.1% of SA's questions to ChatGPT are about work topics, beating both the globe's 30.7% average and Africa's 28.5%.

Some truly surprising insights are that more SA women (56.2%) use ChatGPT than men, that it's mostly older (35+) South Africans who use ChatGPT, and that SA barely uses it as a search engine at all (well below the global average on this one task).

What SA uses ChatGPT for

SA's work-related usage is especially heavy with regard to:

More interesting facts on SA's ChatGPT usage:

Now that you have more of a picture of how SA uses AI, here are 3 ways you can benefit from it right now:

We're watching this space…

Publishers are now selling ads to AI agents, not people. TIME, for example, turns its pages into stripped-down text for AI bots, which outnumber humans on its site most days, and sells brand FAQ ads inside them. Ally Bank is one of the first buyers. Read more.

Google just let Claude and Codex into Android Studio. App builders can now plug any of 40+ AI coding agents into Google's official Android app-building software, and those agents get access to builds, the emulator and crash reports too. See what's new.

Most AI agents skip the step that matters most. Praelexis says every agent runs four moves: sense, comprehend, act and reflect. Checking whether it actually worked is the one most production agents quietly leave out. Read more here.

Normal employees are using AI to build tools to make their work better, faster. And they’re not going to wait for a policy committee. The question is whether the first 100 AI-built apps in your business land somewhere IT can see.

Salus Cloud is offering IT and business leaders a 30-minute technical evaluation. It's a live walkthrough tailored to your stack, not a generic demo.

Here's how it works:

You'll also leave with a straight answer on whether Salus fits your organisation at all.

Progress, not perfection. The first apps will be rough, and that's fine if they're governed.

🗳️ R3.2bn to Vote. The IEC was given R3.2bn for yesterday's local elections, but expects to spend about R4.75bn this financial year, covering the R1.6bn gap from savings. Most of it pays for people and paper. Did you vote?

🔐 Which AI Said That? Anthropic has published FlashProve, open-source research that uses cryptography to prove which AI model wrote a response, without revealing the model itself. Handy if you pay for a premium model and want proof you're getting it.

✈️ Jet Engines for AI. With grid connections taking up to seven years in the US, some AI data centres are now running on retired jet engines rebuilt to burn gas. Power, not chips, is the real AI bottleneck.

💡 SMEs No Longer Flying Blind. If you're running a business without financial direction, you're taking unnecessary risks. Finvoke gives founders on-demand CFO support — strategic, tax-smart and priced for SMEs.*

📦 Peak-Ready Logistics. Black Friday is three weeks away. TFS connects freight from 20+ countries into warehousing and 125 last-mile hubs across 170+ service areas, with 98% on-time delivery from TFS On-Demand.*

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

Come build with Nick and founders like him. The Founder Collab is where SA founders find their people, with weekly accountability, honest feedback, and people who've been where you are.

Yesterday, we showed you Capitec's partner era, asking what you'd do if Capitec called you tomorrow. Most here would assume it's a scam, obviously…

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 📞 I'd answer before the second ring (36%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😅 Assume it's a scam, obviously (55%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧑‍💼 Panic, then update my pitch deck (9%)

Anthropic is worth more than 35 big SaaS companies combined, but it generates 4.6x less revenue, so what gives?

💡 Anthropic's roughly R33tn ($2tn) valuation is more than double the R15.6tn ($948bn) combined market cap of 35 SaaS giants, including SAP, Salesforce, Adobe and Intuit.

💡 Those same 35 companies brought in about R881bn ($53.4bn) in revenue in Q2 2026. Anthropic made about R190bn ($11.5bn), 4.6x less.

💡 Investors are paying for where they think revenue is going, not where it is today: the bet is that AI takes a bigger share of the money businesses spend on software.

For SA SaaS founders, the useful question is whether your product is something AI will replace, or something AI will plug into.

Raising Local Seed Capital, 5 Nov, Online: Alexandra Fraser and Cape Town founders who just closed pre-seed and seed rounds on what raising really takes, at 3pm today. Register free.

FinMaster Friday, 6 Nov, Stellenbosch: A money-themed board game night where you buy spaza shops and ride out property crashes. Get tickets.

AI Video Masterclass, 6 Nov, Online: Aldo Calitz builds an animated product explainer live with AI, from script to final edit, no design team needed. More info.

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

🧊 Next Level: There's a lake in Canada that traps the most insane shapes and bubbles when it freezes in winter.

🎓 Wow Site: Studii pays back the cost of a failed university module, so a bad exam doesn't mean paying for the module twice. Built in Pretoria.