What didn’t work, what did, and how a customer-service agent ended up building AI agents.
Most companies try to get staff using AI by telling them to. That tends to make people more nervous, not more curious.
We asked Jem co-founder and CEO Simon Ellis, whose WhatsApp-based HR platform serves more than 250,000 frontline workers, how Jem moved its team from fearful of AI to excited about it…
The move: make it fun, not compulsory
Jem’s turning point came in early 2025. The company stopped pushing AI from the top and started giving people a reason to play with it. Simon’s summary is that they went from fearful to excited because they made it fun.
“People support what they create.” The line Jem’s coach keeps repeating, and Simon’s reason for not dictating tools
How to get your team excited about AI
1. Drop the memos and mandates
Simon wrote his first memo about AI in 2023, after listening to Sam Altman on Lex Fridman’s podcast. No one really listened for 18 months. Top-down mandates didn’t work either: telling people to adopt AI or else, and buying licences for everyone, didn’t change how they worked. People don’t read memos, and they don’t get curious on instruction.
2. Run weekly hackathons that don’t have to be about work
For the first six months of 2025, Jem ran hackathons every Thursday. People could build anything, even if it had nothing to do with the business, and there were prizes. Slowly, people realised they didn’t need to be engineers to build something useful, and that’s when the return on investment started to show.
3. Let people see what their colleagues are building
Seeing a colleague do it is more convincing than any memo. One Jem customer-service agent, earning around R15,000 a month and headed for a career answering phones, changed her career path because she learned to build AI agents. In Simon’s words, when the person next to you is doing that and you’re not, you start to question it. It’s also why he favours working in person, where someone can turn to you and say “look what I’ve just done.”
Simon can’t simply tell the company which AI tool to use. Instead, Jem feeds information into the business in a structured way and hosts regular sessions, on a Wednesday or a Friday, where people share what they’ve read, learned and failed at. The point is to put ideas in front of people and let them choose to try them.
5. Back the naturally curious
After those sessions, the naturally curious arrive the next day having already tried something, without being asked. Simon says those are the people flying: the ones who come in bleary-eyed because they were obsessed with a problem until 3 am. Give them room, and their results pull the rest of the team along.
The big payoff
Once the whole team is on board, the gains add up fast. Simon now feels personally behind, because his team has overtaken him. And he isn’t planning to shrink the company: if each person becomes ten or a hundred times more productive, he’d rather have more of them, not fewer.
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Want the full story?
Simon’s full panel from The Open Letter Cape Town 2026 is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he goes further than we could cover here:
How Jem’s engineering agent now resolves 92% of maintenance tickets on its own
How Jem tests a new product idea in a week instead of betting six months
Why Jem nearly killed its AI experiments too early
How to share context across offices in three cities
Why he wants a thousand AI-native people, not ten
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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