How are Egypt’s founders and entrepreneurs using AI?

Egyptian founders and entrepreneurs are embedding artificial intelligence across hiring, creative workflows and even deal-making, despite the country ranking 56th out of 64 for global consumer AI adoption. Start-ups and consumer brands are already treating AI literacy as a baseline hiring requirement, using AI to surface financial insights, revive product lines, and streamline contract negotiations — moves that mirror a broader corporate push into AI globally, where a 2025 McKinsey survey found 88% of businesses have adopted AI for at least one business function. At the same time, major national projects continue to attract heavy investment: the Oil Ministry is targeting a 2026 exploration program of 101 wells with expected investment of USD 1.3 bn, while Egyptian National Railways signed four contracts worth EUR 690 mn with an Alstom-led consortium to modernize key freight corridors.

Direct quote

“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,” says Aly Khattab, founder of coffee brand ReQaf.

Context and details

Khattab points to a concrete example of AI delivering commercial value: an AI model called Claude analysed ReQaf’s 2025 and 2026 budgets and flagged a financial insight the team had missed. That analysis led Khattab to revive a previously discontinued limited edition product, underscoring how AI is shifting decision-making from intuition to data-informed bets.

AI is also influencing dealmaking. Ahmed El Hefny, CEO of Zonta and former owner of the brand Amzolute, says AI “handled much of the contract back-and-forth” when he sold Amzolute to US firm InvenTel. El Hefny notes that a regulatory professional remained involved, but AI accelerated negotiations and helped tailor contract language to the company’s objectives.

• Talent and recruitment: Founders increasingly test for prompt-writing and tool familiarity during interviews, elevating AI capabilities to the level of traditional office software skills.
• Product and marketing: Start-ups are using AI to examine budgets, customer data and creative direction; in Khattab’s case, AI revived a product line through financial insight.
• Legal and M&A workflows: Entrepreneurs report using AI to draft, review and iterate contracts, reducing friction in cross-border transactions while still relying on legal professionals for compliance and regulatory checks.

Outlook

For Egypt’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, these early use cases suggest AI will continue to move from experimentation to operational standard. Founders are formalising AI fluency as a hiring prerequisite and embedding models into finance, marketing and corporate transactions. That said, broader consumer adoption in the country still lags global peers, and firms will need to balance AI-driven efficiency gains with robust legal oversight — particularly as deals scale and as national infrastructure and energy projects, backed by hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in investment, heighten demands for governance and risk management.