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Before we introduce you to “Jo”, the JHB In Your Pocket GPT, here’s the journey that brought us to this moment.
1. Est. 2014 – A timeline of Johannesburg In Your Pocket™
PRINTED ORIGINS
Photo: Johannesburg In Your Pocket.
The story of Johannesburg In Your Pocket began in 2014 when we published our very first print guide – a 68-page magazine – and delivered 10,000 copies by hand to hotels and attractions all over the city. From the start, we operated with the knowledge that a city as complex and contradictory, and unexpectedly beautiful as Johannesburg deserved careful mapping and thoughtful storytelling. We grew into a resource not only for tourists, but for Joburg locals wanting a new lens on the place in which they live. We published 18 editions of our magazine from 2014 – 2019.
GUIDE TO A CHANGING CITY
In Joburg, nothing stays still for very long. In 2019, we launched a series of compact neighbourhood guides – starting with Rosebank, and then expanding to the City Centre and to Sandton – to help people navigate our evolving city block by block. Our dream was to round off the series with a Soweto mini-guide. As with many of our projects, each time we sought advertising and some sponsor funding, and worked at different times with many different partners. It was a tough business, funding print products that were distributed to the reader free of charge, save for a handful of copies sold in bookstores. We found our way to the airport, into the Rosebank Gautrain station, and into tourism offices around Joburg, and even saw our mini-guides pop up in Berlin.
Noting the gap in knowledge of ambassadors of the city, we started a series of concierge walks in different neighbourhoods, to connect hotels with their surroundings.
WAYS OF CONNECTING
In 2020 that all changed. Covid-19 put a halt to all printing, and we moved fully online. During this time, we published playlists for at-home dance parties, recipes from chefs who couldn’t open their restaurants, created a support group for hotel concierges who were living in fear of losing their jobs entirely, and hosted a series of online panel discussions focused on tourism. The city changed, and so did we – becoming more immediate, and more digital, while holding fast to our mission of making Joburg accessible, legible, and lovable. We never stopped publishing our weekly newsletter and have grown our Instagram following to over 100k.
We missed people in 2020. The conversations grew daily with readers giving us feedback we previously hadn’t heard. People found our work a source of great comfort at a time of great uncertainty. And so emerged a new approach. One that was centred on fostering the connections we felt across the city.
LOVING ON JOBURG
one for the books in 2025. Photo: Lea's Lens.
Our #JacarandaInYourPocket photo competition was one response to this growing desire for in-person connection: what we've come to dub our "month-long love letter to Joburg". In 2021 we took a City Sightseeing Red Bus around the city with the shortlisted photographers, stopping for bubbly with bloom-filled views on Munro Drive. In 2023 we launched our first full #JacarandaInYourPocket event series which, over the years, has comprised of photo walks, high teas, bloom-spotting rooftop tours, helicopter flips, and a jacaranda-inspired running club takeover.
TANGIBLE MAPS
Photo: Johannesburg In Your Pocket.
In 2024, we dipped our toes into the print world once more in collaboration with Love Jozi and Bridge Books. Together, we mapped Joburg’s literary district – a project that reconnected us to the tactile pleasure of making something physical, and reminded us how vital paper-based storytelling still is. Before that, we had created a custom guide to Rosebank for Coca-Cola’s Rosebank office move and a guide to art Cities for FNB Art Joburg BMW Young Collectors. In 2025, over Tourism Indaba, we took the biggest step back into print since Covid: a 2025 guide to Joburg’s City Centre in collaboration with Jozi My Jozi, and supported by Nando’s. Part map, part narrative guide, it champions tour guides and lets readers navigate the city through their interests – art, food, fashion, heritage, nightlife.
HOW DO WE MAKE MEANING?
What all of this has taught us is that progress in media has never been about mastering technology, but about understanding meaning. From print to pixels to prompts, the question has always been the same: How do we connect? How do we translate the noise of change into something that helps us see ourselves – and each other – more clearly? Johannesburg, for all its chaos, has always known how to answer that. It teaches us, daily, that equilibrium is overrated. That beauty often hides in unfinished things. That identity is a conversation, not a headline.
2. A new way of mapping the city: Meet Jo, the Joburg GPT
November 2025 brings our most practical and accessible tool yet: the JHB In Your Pocket GPT, “Jo.” It works alongside a fully interactive, clickable PDF version of our print guide. What makes this so exciting is that for the first time, everything we produce sits in one place – maps, listings, recommendations, and the local knowledge we’ve built up over more than a decade.
Photo: Johannesburg In Your Pocket.
Jo is designed to be useful. Upload screengrabs for instant context. Switch languages. Ask specific questions about where to go and how to get there, or go as niche as you want. Explore by interest or neighbourhood. It’s an entirely new way of reading the city – and of being in conversation with it. It’s also an evolving space. And, importantly, its use of Open AI means that we are the ones who need to guide the conversation about Joburg.
3. The time is ripe
Photo: Johannesburg In Your Pocket.
JHB In Your Pocket GPT is not a chatbot. This experiment sits at the intersection of technology, storytelling, and place. It’s an attempt to give the city a voice – one that speaks in its own cadence, accent, and rhythm. A voice that reflects not just data, but lived experience.
This technology largely comes from the Global North, and cities like Joburg are still under-represented in the data that shapes AI’s understanding of the world. We want to help change that. Launching Jo is our way of literally putting Joburg on the map – elevating its stories, people, and neighbourhoods – and shaping the future of how global systems see African cities.
Because the more people who interact with Jo, the richer the content becomes. The more conversations we start, the more complete the picture.
This is the next chapter in our long-standing mission: to help people experience Johannesburg with clarity, curiosity, and confidence.
This next shift, powered by AI, is forcing us to rethink again – this time, the very nature of authorship and authority. We are living in a world of no equilibrium. Speed, volatility, and relentless reinvention define our time. The old guardrails of certainty have dissolved. Information moves faster than comprehension; narratives fracture before they settle. In that swirl, cities like Johannesburg – complex, layered, and misunderstood – risk being flattened into caricature. That’s what makes this experiment matter.
At its heart, JHB In Your Pocket GPT is about AI literacy and local agency. It’s a tool that draws from years of editorial work, cultural archives, and human voices – to create a system that knows where Victoria Yards sits in the creative ecology of the city, why the Rand Club still matters, and how the hum of a tuk-tuk in Orlando West, Soweto can tell you as much about resilience as any policy paper.
But more than that, it’s a way to reclaim narrative power. In a world where most AI is trained on Western data and assumptions, this project is a statement: if machines are learning to speak, Johannesburg deserves to teach them their accent.
4. Dispatches from the launch (Wed, Nov 19, 2025)
We launched JHB In Your Pocket GPT to the media at 44 Main Street in Marshalltown (Jozi My Jozi's headquarters) on Wed, Nov 19, 2025.
Jo had the opening word: “I won't sugarcoat it – Jozi can be intense. Inequality is in your face. Safety is real. But so is resilience. So is joy. Visitors either fall in love or feel overwhelmed. Locals? We stay because there's nowhere else that moves like this, that makes you feel like this. Jozi isn't easy – but she's magic.”
Rather than the nerves of how AI may overtake human progress, everyone’s curiosity was piqued. Griffen Shea of Bridge Books said, “This is such an important contribution to the life of the city and how people get around and explore.”
For Ayanda Mnyandu of City Skate Tours, “Jo is a fantastic source of information. A proper way of exploring Joburg.” Meanwhile, CEO of SATSA, David Frost, summed it up perfectly: “This is a game changer, and really timeous.”
It is. South Africa is heading into a digital skills crunch, and an AI companion fills that gap instantly, cheaply, and at scale.
From everyone we spoke to, we agreed most with Tanya Krain of Asisebenze Atelier: “Jo is something locals will use to fall in love with their city all over again. Locals will use Jo far more than tourists, because they live in the city day-to-day and are constantly searching for new places, better routes, and weekend plans. While tourists dip in for short bursts of guidance, locals need a smart, reliable companion that understands their routines, preferences, and neighbourhood quirks – and that’s Jo. Welcome home.”
5. Our partners
A note from our founder: “When I started Johannesburg In Your Pocket city guide 13 years ago, it was fuelled by the realisation that Joburg lacked a voice. This is a city that doesn’t speak for itself. Rather, it’s spoken about in some weird overhang terms like “a world-class city”, once a real sign of ambition but now a degraded and embarrassing moniker that hangs over us.” – Laurice Taitz-BuntmanThis illustrates why an experiment like the JHB In Your Pocket GPT is so close to our hearts. To bring the project to fruition, we collaborated with Mbali Njomane, a social innovator and AI literacy strategist. Njomane says, “In cities like Joburg, AI isn’t about algorithms – it’s about belonging. When you can talk to the city in your own language and your own context, you’re not just using AI… you’re shaping it. Localising global tools turns South Africans from consumers into co-creators of the future.”
This project wouldn't have been possible without the generous support of Joburg champions Jozi My Jozi and Nando's. Thanks also to Big Five at O.R. Tambo International Airport who have sponsored advertising placement for JHB In Your Pocket GPT and handed out our printed City Centre guide to 160 international delegates arriving in Joburg for the G20 Summit.
6. How it works: Chat to Jo!
Now we invite you to meet Jo of JHB In Your Pocket GPT. Your locally minded and globally fluent friend. Jo speaks Joburg, also Jozi and Johannesburg. Jo also speaks the city in just about any language you think of – from Arabic to Zulu. Talk to Jo and help us tell Joburg’s story. Visit jhbinyourpocketgpt.com to get started.
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