Abed Kasaji is the co-founder of US-based Anecdote, an AI-driven customer insights tool. Kasaji was previously the senior product manager of AI and machine learning at Careem

Much ink has been spilt on AI recently varying between excitement, shock, denial and most importantly, fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of job loss, fear of the invasion of privacy. People's fear of technology often stems from a lack of understanding and education. By learning more about how technology works and how it can be used for good, people can overcome their fears and embrace the many benefits that technology has to offer.

While most people wonder about the impact of such technological developments, many businesses are busy harnessing these technologies to improve their experience and operations. 

According to a report from PWC, AI is predicted to contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030 with the Middle East expected to accrue 2 per cent of the total global benefits of AI, equivalent to $320 billion. 

How can founders, businesses, and investors in Mena look at this wave?

Localising language-related challenges has always been a go-to differentiator strategy for Mena-based businesses due to the diversity of dialects in the Arab world and the broader Middle East, other challenges like the right-to-left writing and reading experience and being able to detect the dialect to utilise with chatbots and experiences.

I don’t believe we need our own Arabic Generative AI models to tackle these challenges. With the latest developments in generative AI from companies like OpenAI focusing on the Arabic language, solving for specific challenges doesn’t seem to be a big enough differentiator for local companies to work on. Rather it is better to focus on local business needs and solving those local challenges utilising AI. 

What are business leaders doing wrong? 

The “go big or go home" mentality does not work with AI adoption. AI can be helpful in many tasks but not all, and most importantly, not overnight. We believe that business leaders put very high and unrealistic expectations before experimenting or doing the basic infrastructure work on the data side. 

Taking baby steps, identifying the small experiences you can start with and drive the culture of replacing tasks and not people. 

The region does not lack unique local issues to be solved and businesses can do a lot better in solving these specific problems. For example, e-commerce, payments, and logistics can benefit massively from applied AI solutions.

The founding members of Anecdote worked at Careem’s first AI team and led global applied AI teams at companies like Meta, Cisco, Wish and others.

At Anecdote we opted to build a global product with the flexibility to tackle local challenges, we have helped dozens of businesses harness their vast text feedback and turn it into insights used by product and experience teams. We have seen great impact on e-commerce, marketplace and fintech organisations.

According to a report from Forrester, 73 per cent of data is not used in analytics, which is an even bigger problem when it comes to unstructured data like text and voice. 

The insights utilised by those teams enabled them to understand their customers like never before resulting in reduced churn, creating new products that customers love and solving exceptionally local challenges.

The AI algorithms that are readily available are extremely useful for general tasks and while we are utilising them as a base, we also built a number of proprietary algorithms that are purpose fitted to tackle the client’s first and third-party data.

Our founding team has connections to the region but we did not find enough talent and capital density to support our company in the region. While we believe that the region has a very rapidly emerging talent pool and sophisticated investors, we as a region still do not have the critical mass to produce deeptech.

Takeaway: 

• Businesses and entrepreneurs should not shy away from tackling many of the region’s existing challenges and use AI as a tool.

• Invest in the data infrastructure and the experimentation culture before jumping directly into embracing the latest AI trend.

Edits by Nesma Abdel Azim