How Egypt’s entrepreneurs use AI

🤖 When Claude analyzed Egyptian coffee brand ReQaf’s 2025 and 2026 budgets, it flagged something the team had entirely missed — a financial insight that led founder Aly Khattab (LinkedIn) to revive one of the brand’s discontinued limited editions. For Khattab, that moment confirmed something he’d already built into his hiring process: AI literacy is now a baseline requirement, the new Excel. “When we hire someone, we check their AI skills — how they write prompts, what kind of AI tools they use. If they’re not familiar with AI, it feels like saying ‘sorry, I don’t know how to use Microsoft PowerPoint or Excel’ during a job interview,” Khattab tells EnterpriseAM.

Egypt ranks 56th out of 64 countries in global consumer AI adoption — but among the entrepreneurs building businesses here, the picture looks different. AI is already part of the hiring process, the creative workflow, and, for some, the boardrooms where major moves happen. When Ahmed El Hefny (LinkedIn), CEO of Zonta, sold his brand Amzolute to US firm InvenTel, AI handled much of the contract back-and-forth. “Of course, there was a [regulatory] professional on board, but AI really helped with the process and the back-and-forth with [InvenTel] and making sure the contract fits what we’re trying to do,” he tells us.

According to a 2025 McKinsey survey, 88% of businesses globally have adopted AI for at least one business function — and Egypt's founders are making sure they’re not left behind. We spoke with three of Egypt’s founders to see how they’re putting AI to work — and what it’s actually changing.

AI as the new workplace staple

AI first found its footing in administrative work — and Egypt’s entrepreneurs put it to use. Khattab relies on a WhatsApp-based AI personal assistant that reads and summarizes his emails, organizes his schedule, and keeps him updated on his calendar. Karim Harouny, CEO of the online gardening and nursery platform Mashtal, takes a “work smart, not hard” approach: before AI, his customer service team would spend almost 15 minutes crafting a reply to an Arabic-language email. “Your AI will do all of that in a fraction of a second now. From a CS perspective, it’s brilliant,” Harouny says.

El Hefny was an early mover, experimenting with LLMs before ChatGPT arrived. “I was fooling around with a couple of LLMs before ChatGPT. It just makes a lot of the manual work a lot easier, and it helps with brainstorming, planning, and a lot of the thought processes that go behind the work. It's a very valuable resource that you use as per your disposition,” he tells us. For El Hefny, opting out isn’t a neutral position. “If you're operating purely without the help of any AI resources, you're fighting an uphill battle. Your competitors in the market have that valuable resource, so they can do more with their time than you can single-handedly. It's a big boost when it comes to output and ideation.”

Where the returns show up… and the gaps that remain

Beyond admin, AI has made its way into finance, accounting, creative direction, and big-buck decisions. For Khattab, it has transformed ReQaf’s marketing output — feeding the tools a brief and getting a full campaign script back. “You just need to feed them the correct prompts. They understand what your business is like. You just tell the bot, ‘I have a campaign for a new origin,’ give them a quick brief, and the script is ready.”

Harouny’s visually driven business runs on Google’s Gemini for creative ideation, which he uses to generate visuals and bounce ideas off Gemini through conversational prompting. “It’s like an incredibly intelligent, friendly buddy. If I need some kind of visual aid, I just go in, work on my prompt, and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it — nine out of ten times, it just nails it.”

The tools Egypt’s founders reach for most — Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Nano Banana — are genuinely useful, but not yet fully accessible to everyone. Harouny is candid about the ceiling. “It’s still not completely accessible to the average user. You still have to have a somewhat technical background to fully utilize the tool. But that gap is slowly being bridged daily.”

Harouny has taken a course through Anthropic to get deeper into Claude, with an eye toward eventually setting up his own agents. “Ideally, I would love to be one of those people who can set up their own agents, but every time I start down that path, I realize very quickly that it's just not there yet. I’m waiting for it to be a bit more accessible.” Harouny suspects he's barely scratching the surface and keeps pushing his team to find better ways to use the tools available.

El Hefny has gone further, spending the past year and a half on prompt engineering. “I delved a little into prompt engineering almost a year and a half ago. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, but I have relative confidence and competence in how to prompt properly to get better results,” El Hefny says. For Khattab, the answer is institutional: AI training is built into onboarding at ReQaf, ensuring the whole team moves forward together. Constant learning has become a priority — not just a nice-to-have.

Egypt’s entrepreneurs aren’t waiting for AI to mature before putting it to work — they’re learning alongside it, integrating it into hiring decisions, creative direction, and big-buck business moves in real time. The tools aren’t perfect, and there’s still a learning curve. But for the founders who’ve leaned in, the returns are already showing up where they count.