Western Cape (WC), South Africa
AI development for Cape Town teams, handed over in writing
One shop, Vancouver, British Columbia. Cape Town sits on the other side of a full day, so nothing about this engagement runs on meetings. It runs on written handoffs, logged decisions and review that happens while the other side is asleep.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Cape Town, South Africa
- your clock
- UTC+02:00 (Africa/Johannesburg)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Cape Town
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Cape Town is 10 hours ahead of Vancouver. When we start at 09:00 it is 19:00 on the same day for you, and when we stop at 17:00 it is 03:00 on the next day. On the same calendar date there is no hour where both sides are at work.
The honest version of this is a selling point. You get a full uninterrupted Vancouver day of work delivered as a written handoff, and we get your review waiting for us in the morning. Two shifts a day, no overtime.
- A handoff note goes out at the end of every Vancouver working day: what shipped, what broke, and what needs a decision from you.
- You read it at 03:00, or whenever your day starts, and review the pull requests it points at.
- Decisions are logged as they are made, in the repository, so neither side has to reconstruct why something was done.
- A blocking question arrives with a proposed answer attached, so the default outcome is progress rather than a stalled day.
One live call a week, and it is scheduled honestly: 07:00 in Vancouver is 17:00 in Cape Town. That hour is outside our working day and inside yours. We take the awkward end of it, because it is our job to be reachable.
What Cape Town buyers usually bring us
The record for Cape Town lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
financial services
Research, filings and internal policy are the corpus. Hybrid search with metadata filters as hard constraints, plus span citations, or it does not ship.
It starts with your documents and your own analysts writing the questions the system has to get right before anyone will trust it.
Closest service line: Knowledge bases and retrieval
business process outsourcing
Delivery teams get handed AI tooling and no practice. Sessions on real tickets, in the client stack, are what makes the tooling stick past the pilot.
A block of sessions across a few weeks beats one long day, because the practice needs real work in between sittings.
Closest service line: Training and enablement
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in US dollars. Payments from South Africa carry their own banking steps, so invoice timing is agreed at the start rather than chased at month end.
The rest is the same everywhere: we scope it, we build a thin slice against your real data, and we hand back something your own team can maintain. No retainer you cannot cancel and no seat licences.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Cape Town included. Most engagements are one of them, sometimes two.
- AI products, built end to end
- Knowledge bases and retrieval
- Codebase and team optimization
- Training and enablement
- Forward-deployed engineering
The languages, models and infrastructure underneath all five are listed on the Magic Ship stack page, with what each one is good for and where it is the wrong choice.
Other markets in Africa
Each one has its own page, its own overlap arithmetic and its own industries.
Start a project
Send the problem rather than a job spec. You get an answer on scope, timeline and whether we are the right shop, written by the person who would do the work.