Leadership In AI

I had the pleasure to speak at the event “Growing in Unity” Harvard Business School Club of the GCC & Keystone, where H.E. Mohamed BinTaliah, UAE Assistant Minister of Cabinet Affairs, highlighted the UAE as a startup nation. At the heart of this agenda was people – because that is the founding leader's legacy. Dr. Caroline Faraj, vice president of CNN Arabic, asked him about the AI journey, and he highlighted the painstaking process of validating Agentic AI with the human-in-the-loop.

I was on a powerhouse panel of women - H.E. Eng. Amal Abdulrahim, Assistant Undersecretary, Chief AI & Innovation Officer from the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment (they just won the Zero Bureaucracy Award), and the award-winning H.E. Mubaraka Ibrahim, CIO / CAIO - Emirates Health Services, moderated by Andy G. Gandhi. HE Amal highlighted the process of building responsible AI - 6 months of data cleaning before POC. H.E. Mubaraka told us about Amal, the healthcare AI Assistant Physician, built with doctors.

I wore the private-sector hat, highlighting that responsible AI and its AI governance need leadership.

🌟 Leadership is about Steering. Since the pandemic, we have been confronted with a fuzzy future; now more than ever, we need to determine the role of people, the skills pipeline, and the role of business in providing that stability. More AI responsibilities for the Board!

🌟 Leadership is about the Team. We are now confronted with teams made of humans and AI, and AI is the entitled teenager. How we put together the processes to be fair, not overburden the human-in-the-loop, who is not a machine, and retain talent is key.

🌟 Leadership is about making a decision trade-off about the here and now: We know the failure rate of AI is huge simply because the leadership underestimates the cost of AI – it is unlike any other infrastructure and tech project. The hardware needs to be replaced, the algorithms need to be updated (especially if you are using third-party providers or vibe coding), and the data may not be relevant (not even talking of the sustainability costs). Hence, in the future, we need to budget for technical and cybersecurity debt, ~10-40% of the IT budget.

Thank you to the amazing Shibani Suri, HBS GCC Chapter, led by Saleh Lootah, the organizers, and all the speakers for a truly memorable evening. Huge shoutout to Christina Ioannidis for the excellent job as MC. I saw some old friends here, Wessam H.Haddad, Abhishek David, and Sarah Bawazir – thank you for coming. I made many new ones too!