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Send this to a friend you'd challenge to a mech battle. 🦾

In Today’s Open Letter

McKinsey expects 57% of all work hours to be automated by 2030 and 82% of SA managers expect AI to boost productivity (but don’t know how yet), which is why overseas companies are seeing major AI returns already, while in SA, only 5% of enterprise AI projects actually go into production. This local venture is looking to help SA companies change that…

South Africa is leading Africa's AI adoption at 21.1%, and 4 in 5 SA managers told the Bureau for Economic Research that they truly believe that AI will meaningfully impact productivity very soon (they’re just not sure how yet).

As economist Johan Fourie puts it, AI is moving from optional to unavoidable in South African professional work. And those that get it right are already seeing results: 

The gap between businesses using AI properly and those still talking about it is widening fast. And there’s a local venture looking to help SA get on top…

The local startup closing the diffusion gap

Kwanda is a Cape Town-based AI enablement partner that designs, deploys and maintains AI agents and automations for businesses.

Founders Chris Immelman and Kieran Donnelly tell us that Kwanda doesn't build AI agents; they build the infrastructure that makes agents useful — the plumbing layer that most "AI-first" companies skip.

See, not to knock anyone, but most commercial AI today is basically marketplaces full of pre-built specialist AI SaaS tools that solve 1 or 2 problems really well. This route doesn’t work for an enterprise, because they’d end up with thousands of tiny, high-risk tools that don’t really want to talk to each other and are unwieldy to manage at scale.

What Kwanda uniquely does is build a custom AI brain inside your company that can access every corner of your business to figure out what truly needs to be done, and then only deploy unique (custom-made) agents to perform specific tasks as a cohesive, AI-powered whole that’s unique to your business. To help SA companies get started quickly and safely, they offer custom AI roadmaps.

Their track record spans clients across VC, events, procurement, engineering and legal (most of whom started with one automation and kept coming back).

We're watching this space…

PS: Want to see what AI implementation actually looks like inside real SA businesses? Not dreams and gimmicks, actual AI that generates revenue right here in SA? Then join us in Cape Town in June for AI in Action.

Have your say…

What if AI could preserve your grandmother's life story? Praelexis built Ria, a voice-first app that lets elderly people share memories through natural conversation; then structures them into a biography that families can actually read. See how it works here.

What if your cursor just knew what you meant? Google DeepMind's Magic Pointer lets Gemini understand what you're pointing at and act on "this" or "that" — no full prompt needed. Read more here.

Running multiple AI coding sessions at once? Claude Code's new Agent View gives you one dashboard for managing parallel coding sessions and longer-running work. Available on all paid Claude plans. Check it out here.

Your customers are on WhatsApp all day, every day. The question is how you show up there…

Chat Inc is the WhatsApp marketing platform already trusted by Under Armour, Crocs, TFG, Pepkor and Coca-Cola. Their product, flEX, gives marketing teams everything they need to run broadcast campaigns, capture leads, segment audiences and track performance, all inside WhatsApp.

The numbers are hard to argue with: 85–95% open rates, 15–20% click-through rates, and return on campaign spend north of 2'000%. One retail partner reported a 14% sales lift. Another hit 335% ROI on a single voucher campaign.

This isn't experimental; Chat Inc is a certified Meta Business Partner and flEX is built on the official WhatsApp Business API.

🛡️ Quote Me on That. Naked just became the first company in the world to offer binding insurance quotes through ChatGPT’s native app. This is the kind of SA innovation we like to see.

📉 345k Jobs Gone. SA's unemployment rate is rising again, shedding 345'000 jobs in three months. Youth unemployment sits at 45.8% — that's almost 1 in 2. Can these numbers be real? People must be earning from somewhere, which begs the question: What's SA’s real economy actually doing?

🚀 Print, Load, Launch. US company Chromatic 3D Materials just successfully tested 3D-printed rocket fuel, a solid fuel that lets rockets be stored fully fuelled and ready to go. SA should be R&D'ing stuff like this.

🦎 One Angry Land Cruiser. SA armoured vehicle manufacturer SVI Engineering unveiled the Max Recon, a new 6x6 tactical vehicle based on the Toyota Land Cruiser 70 series. The extra axle makes it even more unstoppable off-road. SA skills meeting global demand, we love to see it.

🎨 Brand ≠ Product. If your product is world-class but your brand doesn't match, you're leaving deals on the table. DoubleShift helps FinTech, payments and tech companies close the gap between what they've built and how the market sees them.*

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

Yesterday, we showed SA’s Startup of the Year finalists, saying that you can vote for the People's Choice to score one of them a R5k voucher from Johnson Workwear and free promotions in The Open Letter.

Well, tonight's the night. Ten startups take the stage at Innovation City Cape Town to pitch live for Startup of the Year 2026. Which means you have only today left to vote for your favourite startup and help decide the People's Choice winner.

Go vote now →

Know someone who should vote too? Go to your referral hub to share your unique link to get your friends to vote — it stays open all day Thursday, so get your friends involved. 🗳️🔥

Cape Town has more Airbnbs than Madrid, Melbourne and Hong Kong. And it's still growing…

💡 Cape Town added 6'000+ Airbnb listings in two years, a 31% increase, while most global cities have plateaued.

💡 Among cities with a similar population size (~4.6 million), only Rome has more listings.

💡 The growth continues as regulatory pressure tightens elsewhere (but not in CPT? Wouldn’t that turn the city into a ghost town in a few years?).

For founders building in travel, hospitality or PropTech: Cape Town's short-term rental density is exceptional, and the window before regulation catches up is the opportunity.

🧩 Tool to Try: Birthday Invitation AI lets you design and send birthday invites in seconds.

🤧 That's Interesting: Your granny was right: a 5°C drop in nasal tissue temperature cuts your immune response nearly in half, which is why the cold really does make you sick.

🏃‍♀️ Next Level: Watch a woman win a 400 km ultramarathon, overall; as in, she finished even before the first men crossed the line.

🔢 Wow Site: Googolplex Written Out tells the story of a man producing books to contain one of the largest numbers known (more digits than atoms in the visible universe).

🧠 Work Smarter: Want to be really sure you are successful? Alex Hormozi breaks down the 5 elements of an ideal business; the industries and approaches that are easier to grow, manage and profit from, for the same effort.