Charles Savage spent two days in the Cape Winelands with around forty people who have built, backed, sold and rebuilt some of South Africa’s biggest businesses. Twenty-six talks covered AI, friction, failure, the GNU and an island of albatrosses, all under Chatham House Rule. Here’s what he took away from it, including a final night spent sleeping in his car.

From Charles 

I spent two days this week in a room that made me listen harder than I have in a long time.

A private gathering in the Cape Winelands. Around forty people who have built, backed, sold and rebuilt some of the biggest names in South African business. Bankers, insurers, investors, founders. Some had been building companies for longer than the youngest speaker had been alive.

And then there was me.

I had said yes to a fifteen-minute talk and ten minutes of questions without asking who would be listening. Had I asked, I might have thought twice. The gathering ran under the Chatham House Rule, so I will not tell you who was there or who said what. What I can share is what I took from it. There was plenty. My job was to tell the Easy origin story and say something useful about where we might go next. Easy went down well, as it usually does. The line that landed was that EasyEquities was not built for just the people in that room. It was also built for their kids. Afterwards, almost everyone had a story about their child using the platform. I walked in intimidated and walked out reminded of what our team has built.

But I was mostly there to listen. What follows is not a record of the programme. It is what stayed with me on the drive home, grouped by the thoughts it left behind.

On Predicting the Future, and Changing Your Mind

The event opened with twenty-three predictions for 2027 and beyond. Geopolitics. The US fiscal position. AI investment. Humanoid robots. South Africa’s Government of National Unity.

A few stayed with me. An AI-driven market correction of 25 to 35 percent next year, but a rotation rather than a bust. Two hundred thousand humanoid robots produced globally in 2027, most of them in China. The GNU holding through the year at odds of about seventy percent. South African growth of 1.7 percent, with the real upswing a rail and water story for 2028 and beyond. I am not sure I could hold two or three of those subjects in my head at once, never mind stand up and make predictions about all of them. What I liked even more was watching the same person change his mind. By the end of the two days, he had shifted his view on one or two of them after hearing what followed.

That set the tone. The most experienced people in the room were also the most willing to be wrong.

On Building Things That Last

Two of the talks I valued most were about the same business, from opposite ends. One took us inside the machine. The depth of data they use to understand the business, almost in real time, is extraordinary. Every measure connects to a decision, a behaviour and an outcome. You could hear the years of discipline it took to build. The other showed us the people inside it. If the first talk was the machine, the second was its heart, lungs and voice. It was my favourite of the two days. It was delivered with the kind of conviction that makes you want to be on that team, and I asked afterwards whether it could be given to ours. Someone else described turning around a large, established institution as “the saving of a dinosaur.” What a description of the work involved in making something that size move again. It took two very different kinds of leader: one to give the strategy a loud voice, one to bring the numbers, the interrogation and the discipline. Neither would have been enough alone. The story of one of the country’s great business successes was told by someone who lived it. From a distance, that kind of success looks inevitable. Up close, the road was long and hard. What impressed me most was the effort spent building an entrepreneurial culture and then protecting it as the business grew. At the right moments they brought in people willing to unsettle things enough to move forward, without losing the culture underneath.

That is a balance I think about often at Easy.

Knowing when to stop came up as often as knowing how to start. One investor walked us through the questions he asks before backing anything. How big could the market become? Is the promise to the customer simple? Can competitors easily copy the business? Do you have the patience to stay when the right idea takes longer than you hoped? His stories about stopping were just as useful. A venture launched before its time. A consumer platform with millions of users that missed a technology shift. His point was that conviction needs to be tested honestly. Keep going back to the original plan and ask whether the reason you believed in it still holds. A founder and one of his investors spoke about the same company from opposite sides. The investor could explain why the bet made sense. The founder could tell us what it feels like from inside the attempt, with the story still being written. I found the second view rarer and more valuable.

And I heard from people who have paid the price of persistence. Founders who scaled businesses from South Africa to the world and ran into capital, exchange control and regulatory walls doing it. What I admired was that their response has been to try to make the path easier for the founders coming after them.

On Friction

If there was one word that ran through the two days, it was friction. Where it sits, who it costs, and how much value goes to whoever removes it.

In retail, platforms such as TikTok Shop are collapsing the distance between seeing something and buying it. If a customer is ready in that moment, why make them leave the moment to complete the purchase somewhere else? I thought about every unnecessary step we still ask an Easy customer to take.

In marketing, AI is starting to connect advertising, a website, search and the path to a completed purchase into one responsive system. The parts of a business that once needed separate teams and separate decisions can increasingly respond to each other.

In cars, one business is treating ownership as something that should fit a customer’s life and finances now, with the ability to change as those circumstances change. Know which cars to buy, how to maintain them, how to sell them again. More interestingly, use the data to see financial strain coming and help a customer change cars before it becomes a crisis. I left thinking about an Easy Cars. There are real legs in that idea in South Africa.

In banking, someone wants to build a bank people love because it enables their financial lives. That is a bold ambition in an industry where customers have learned to expect friction and fees they struggle to understand. It also sounded familiar. Much of Easy’s success has come from caring about how people feel when they use the platform.

And in money itself. One speaker took us back to the origins of money and asked what might happen if we changed how it moves through Africa. His argument was that removing friction from money could do more for growth than AI itself.

That is quite a claim to make at an AI gathering. Given the work we do at Easy, I took that question home with me.

On AI, and Who Is Actually Using It

The gathering was built around AI, and one session made the pace of change feel more real than the headlines do. One speaker argued that AI is beginning to improve AI, and that robots may soon build robots. If that loop closes, progress could accelerate beyond the pace humans set. His view was that the singularity has already started.

One comparison stayed with me. Measured on the same tests, the best available model has gone from a score of five to above fifty in four years. The lead keeps changing, and capabilities that were at the frontier a year ago are now available at a fraction of the cost. The field is far deeper than the handful of names most of us follow.

Ramp’s AI Index, drawn from US businesses, shows just how far apart companies already are. The top one percent of AI spenders pay roughly $7,500 a month per employee. The median company pays around $11. That gap could shape the next decade.

Someone working on AI adoption across Africa carried a frustration I recognised. She can see what these tools make possible and wants more people to start using them.

I feel the same anxiety in our own business, and among friends and family. The people leaning in are learning at an extraordinary rate. Too many others are still watching.

Geography matters, and here the news for South Africa was mixed. Software can arrive almost everywhere on day one, wherever export rules allow it. Robots have to be deployed physically, and the economics may pull them to higher-wage markets first. The effect could still reach us through automated factories abroad competing with the industries we export to.

The next race is agents, AI that does the work rather than answers questions. One prediction was that agents could soon initiate most purchases and payments. Every business will have to answer the same question: who sits between you and your customer? Your agent, theirs, or a platform’s?

What I took from it for Easy was a single line. The information you sell gets cheap. The information only you generate does not. Having the same AI does not make businesses the same. The practical advice was equally plain: close your feedback loop and make it faster, own the data only you produce, and lean on the advantages a machine cannot rent, the licence, the balance sheet, the network. For each of us personally, spend an hour of the working day with the best model, on the work you already do. Your impact is your talent multiplied by the AI you actually use.

And a line for the parents among us. Teach your kids to learn something deeply enough to know when the machine is wrong.

The final session made the point at a human scale. The speaker described helping a young man studying tourism use ChatGPT to give shape to a business plan and a website. One small encounter, but it made him ask what wider AI literacy could unlock for ordinary workers and entrepreneurs. He cheerfully allowed that it might turn out to be one of his bad ideas. He put it to everyone anyway.

On Asking for Help

The thing that surprised me most was how often people with every reason to be certain of themselves asked the room for help.

A founder taking healthcare to far more people through access, mobility and AI finished his talk by asking where to go next, and what he might be missing. Another is solving a health problem born from his own experience. When he needed help, the information was scattered across doctors, tests, food, wearables and his daily life. He has built a way to bring it together. People came forward immediately to understand what he was building and how they could help.

The youngest speaker stood in front of that formidable audience and had everyone listening. I found myself wishing I had encountered people like that at her age. When she does have an ask, plenty of them will be ready.

Some of the most valuable contributions came from people who never went on stage at all. Questions that brought clarity and depth. Conversations between talks. The programme could tell you who presented. It could not capture everything people gave one another.

On South Africa

Two speakers took on the country’s political future, and I needed to hear both.

The first gave me confidence in the breadth of South Africa’s political centre. He also challenged business to take a more active role in developing the next generation of political leaders. I have mostly left politics to the politicians, and his talk made me question whether that is enough.

The second shared the desire for strong leadership but drew a different line. Politicians must do the work of politics. Business should help build the stability, governance and conditions in which capable politicians can emerge and do that work well.

I am still thinking about where the useful contribution lies.

More Than Business 

One talk took us somewhere else entirely: Marion Island, a South African speck in the Southern Ocean and one of the most important seabird breeding sites on the planet. Mice carried there by ships in the 1800s have learned to eat the chicks of birds that evolved with no land predators. The albatrosses do not fly away. They sit on their nests and are eaten alive. Twenty-nine bird species breed on the island. If the mice stay, nineteen are projected to become locally extinct, the Wandering Albatross among them, and a piece of the Southern Ocean’s food web goes with them.

The approach is known and has worked on other islands: a carefully planned aerial baiting operation. If it succeeds on Marion, the birds would have a chance to recover. The project still needs funding.

You can sponsor a hectare for R1,000 through the Mouse-Free Marion Project. The island is thirty thousand hectares and just under half are spoken for. A handful of people in that room could have closed the gap between them. I suspect a few of you reading this could too.

We heard about the mental pressure on young athletes at South Africa’s top rugby schools, and how much of it comes from parents, before and after the game. We want the best for our children. We can also make it terribly hard for them to enjoy what they love. As a parent, I had to sit with that one. Someone told a fishing story that explained my own love of fishing better than I have ever managed to explain it myself. Out on the water off Madagascar, fighting a giant trevally, the captain shouted one word at him: “Breathe.” I recognised that moment immediately.

Over dinner, a speaker discussed the pressure facing the wine industry and a response: fewer bottles, made better. That willingness to question the product itself felt like a fitting end to two days of people questioning how their own industries work. I met someone whose life had crossed mine in so many unlikely ways that we may even have shared a surf lineup without knowing it.

And given the calibre of the people hosting and attending, it was only fitting that I spent my final night sleeping in my car.

A series of poorly timed messages, phones set to silent, electric fences and locked gates left me choosing the path of least resistance. I reclined the seat and called it a night. It is not something I have done in decades. It was a timely reminder that you are never too old, or too experienced, to find yourself somewhere other than where you planned.

The Savage Take

Two days. Twenty-six presentations. Close to thirty speakers, and a room that gave back as much as it received. Hundreds of insights, far more than I have managed to fit here.

I had planned to write about markets this week. They did not seem to matter much while I was there.

What I came away with was not a list of ideas. It was a single, overwhelming realisation. South Africa holds so much potential. It was sitting in one room for two days, and that room was a fraction of what this country has. The question is not whether the talent, the capital or the will exists. It plainly does. The question is whether we can find more ways to find common ground, and then focus on building the things that move us forward most. Nobody in that room got where they are by being right every time. Their stories were full of ventures that did not work, calls made too early or too late, ideas whose time had not come.

That is the part we could use more of as a country. The willingness to try, to learn and to go again. Failure has consequences, and we have to own them. But fear of getting something wrong cannot become our reason for building nothing at all.

I went there to tell a fifteen-minute story about Easy. I came home thinking about what we might build next, and who we might build it with.

The world is not waiting. What you do next is the only thing that matters.

Stay Savage,

Charles

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