Why rationing AI holds a startup back, what everyone should have access to, and how high to set the bar.
The usual approach is to wait until someone proves they need a better AI plan. By then you’ve lost months of what they could have built.
We asked Magic Safari founder and CEO Philip Joubert, who ran OfferZen for about ten years, how he got his whole startup using AI…
The move: if you have nothing to lose, fully commit
Philip doesn’t think a large company like Capitec should go all in overnight. A startup is different. If you have nothing to lose, he says, fully commit, starting with the tools you put in everyone’s hands.
“Inverse it. Make them feel guilty for not using it.”
How to give every employee the AI tools your developers have
1. Give everyone the top plan, not the basic one
Don’t wait for people to max out a basic plan before upgrading them. At Magic Safari, developers get at least one or two top-tier accounts, at around R3,200 a month each, and non-developers use developer tools such as Claude Code and Codex too. Even their contractors edit video with code.
Philip calls this the biggest gain. Put your strategy, customer profiles, pain points, products, key decisions and meeting notes in one wiki. Then asking AI to compare a meeting with your strategy becomes effortless. A 10-person startup can set one up in a few hours and add to it over time. Magic Safari’s lives in Notion, and it only works if you trust your team, because everything is in there. We covered how to build one in our business context layer guide.
3. Give everyone read-only access to business data
Let everyone see the CRM and the revenue numbers, read-only. The usual worry is that people who aren’t data scientists will misread things. Philip’s answer is to give them access anyway: people learn and level up.
4. Raise the bar as if everyone is fully using AI
Set expectations on the assumption that everyone has these tools and uses them. Philip is direct about it: this is the minimum bar, and if you can’t produce at that level, you don’t have the job. He says it’s easier in a new company, where you can simply ask whether people still want the job.
5. Make thinking part of the job
More AI brings a new risk. Philip believes people are thinking less: a missed deadline is easy to spot, but polished AI output looks finished even when nobody thought it through. His fix is cultural. You haven’t done the job if you haven’t thought about it, and handing in AI slop counts as not doing it at all.
The big payoff
When everyone has the best tools, the company’s knowledge and its numbers, the whole team builds faster, not just the developers. The cost of a few top-tier accounts is small next to what people produce with them.
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Want the full story?
Philip’s full keynote from The Open Letter Cape Town 2026 is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he goes further than we could cover here:
Why he uses as little AI in his product as possible
Why the factory matters more than the car
Why he hires for taste and agency
The public library of mental models he built from 40-plus thinkers
You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.
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