Digital Factory Director at stc Kuwait. Enterprise AI consultant. Founder of Khatib Designs.
I sit on both sides of the table most people only see one of: inside a national telco, where AI has to survive procurement, governance and a board — and inside my own studio, where it has to ship on a deadline and actually work. Most AI advice in the Gulf comes from one side or the other. The useful part is in the overlap.
I direct the Digital Factory at stc Kuwait, where AI has to clear governance, security and procurement before it ever reaches a customer. I wrote the AI governance framework the work runs under — risk tiers, autonomy levels and the approval gates that decide what an AI system is allowed to touch.
An Arabic-first design and AI-enablement studio serving Kuwait and the GCC. We build the products and the automation behind them — and the studio itself is run by an autonomous AI system I built, which researches, writes, publishes and reports every day without being asked.
Almost every stalled AI project I have seen in the Gulf stalled for the same three reasons, and none of them were technical: nobody agreed which decisions AI was allowed to make, nobody owned it when it was wrong, and nobody had decided what to build first.
The second thing: Arabic is not a translation layer. A product that reads as translated reads as untrustworthy, and in this region that decides adoption long before the technology does.
And the third: a pilot that cannot go live is not a pilot, it is a slide. I would rather ship one working agent in two weeks than present a roadmap for six.