Fouad Jeryes (Maqsam) on Why MENA's Fragmentation is the Opportunity, Why Arabic AI Benchmarks are BS, & Why Your Competitors are Your Best Salespeople

[00:00:00] Starting a company is a race in mental health disguised as a career path. People who give you bullshit answers about augmenting only and all that. Yes, it is augmenting, but it's gonna replace jobs. We should definitely be very comfortable with that idea. Bezos famously said, your margin is my opportunity.

And we famously say Your attrition is our opportunity Company that comes in and says, you know, we're 97% accurate in Arabic and whatever those companies should shoot themselves in the face. Media headlines are great, but if you really know the technology, you know that English doesn't have that high of an accuracy rate.

For you to have that in Arabic voice, it is the best form of communication. And I would argue it's not just the first one that we learn or we've learned as a human race, but it's also going to be the last interface that we actually use. The next best thing is gonna be telepathy. If you wanna play in the big leagues, you wanna go.

Where now, though, is that a lot of people look at me and they say, are you guys a Saudi company? Our company, a MENA-based company, built with love in MENA.

Welcome back to the FWDstart Podcast. This is Jamie Lane, your host, and we have an absolutely fantastic episode for you today. Why is it so [00:01:00] fantastic? Well, essentially, our guest is just incredibly open, transparent, and not shy of a contrarian or controversial take, which always helps. The guest in question is Fouad Jeryes, the co-founder of MXAB, a MENA-based AI-powered cloud communications platform.

Now, over the course of the episode, we get into why Fuad thinks his competitors are actually his best salespeople. Why most Arabic accuracy benchmarks are complete BS, and why MXAB stayed deliberately quiet on fundraising while quietly building one of the region's most capital efficient businesses.

This is a fantastic one. You'll want to listen to it in full, but as always, before we get into it.

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Fuad, very welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Very excited to be here. And thank you for figuring out the logistics on this as well because , I know I put you through , the ringer as far as you've come directly from the airport. , Especially for this. There's no other reason you're in there. No, I flew in for this, man.

Don't worry about it. There you go. But , I'd love to start and I didn't realize the backstory to MXAB and how it actually kick started. So I really [00:03:00] enjoyed that and the research, and I'd love to get it from , the horse's mouth, as it were. Sure. Can you tell me. About Cash Basha. Have I, have I done it wrong?

Cash Basha. So the word Bacha is originally a Turkish name. It's Pasha, but we don't have, obviously PS in, in the Arabic language, so it turns into Pasha. And that is usually used with you know, saying somebody, oh, you’re a basha, you’re a boss, really. So Cash Basha is basically the the service that we built.

Yeah. So the genesis of, of MXAB happened, when we really felt a pain. Sinan, my co-founder and I have been working together for over a decade now. , Lasted longer than most marriages, as I, yeah, as I would say. But, but we've done a series of startups together and we were in payments. We started looking at the region, obviously seeing what problems exist in this part of the world and in a region that is very.

Border, you know, heavy and fragmented. , You want to take a look at, what kind of things that you want to erase between borders and mm-hmm. Big businesses are in payments, are in logistics. And it just so happens that, also, you know, e-commerce is a big part of that. So we started building a payment solution.

That payment solution evolved into something that was more into logistics. After that, we took a [00:04:00] look at the customs problems that were there, and then we realized that 80% of people who wanna buy anything online actually , want it from an international website and not a local one. Hmm. So, obviously all these, you know, there's a big mess and big, difficulties and people, getting to buy stuff.

And we built a service called Cash Bacha. And that took some of these technologies that we built, and it was really a, a kind of an experiment. , We were a bit frustrated, you know, we built a lot of great stuff. We went to the souks at the time. Yes, we went to all these other players and they're like, you know, we will put into our pipeline.

We'll see in six months. And we wanted to eat our own dog food and get something up and running. And so, with some of the facts that we knew and some of the difficulties that we knew we can solve, we built the service. And very shortly after we became one of the heaviest trafficked, e-commerce websites in Jordan.

Basically we built it , on the, the shoulders of. Amazon. Mm-hmm. One of the giants in this world. And we allowed anyone to buy from Amazon to get it locally to their doorstep with the final price right there. No surprises in shipping, no surprises in customs, and you can pay in cash, which is the preferred, you know, form of payment at the time.

, After that, we had more customers in six different markets at the time, so we expanded the business, but they needed to call us and we needed to call them. One of the essential things in [00:05:00] every business, not just customer service, and Amazon is probably the quintessential. Yes company in the customer service world you know, you want to be able to delight your customers.

Mm-hmm. And doing that over the phone, over the over voice communication is one of the best ways of doing it. , There was no solution for us as a small to medium sized company at the time, to be able to speak to the, these customers, get local numbers in these different markets that we , have them call us locally and us call them locally, be able to record it unless we went to a legacy system, like Cisco or Avaya, one of these guys.

Yes. We were quoted about $170,000 at the time. Wonderful. To kind of set up this, and it's gonna take months of setups 'cause you have to have local data centers, local registrations. Before that, obviously in every single country, you have to integrate into the telco infrastructure there, put it over the cloud, have a system that can actually accept it, and then you can route the calls as you wish, either to a remote team or a local team.

And that was just headaches everywhere. Super, super big pain. Mm. And so we took that pain and realized that there's a massive opportunity here. The region, and the fragmentation of the region is actually an opportunity, because of the regulation that's that's present in this part of the world because of these difficulties.[00:06:00]

A lot of the international players that are all billion dollar players in this space don't come to our, this part of the world. Why is that? Well, first of all, because of the, the difficulties. Complexity. Yeah, the complexity. But also, I mean, to them the Arab world is a rounding error in terms of, them doing it so.

We talk about localization. When you talk about AI startups that are looking after dialects and all these different things, like the dialect problem is a, symptom. It's not a disease. Yes. The disease is Silicon Valley. The disease is, for lack of a better expression, wall Street. Mm-hmm. Who isn't investing in this part of the world because it wasn't one of the big major markets.

Yep. And so actually building products from the market to the market and being able to service these customers was not something that they did. And, we thought that we can take it onto ourselves, to be able to build something that solves our solution. We, talked to a bunch of our friends who were in the startup community.

They came back to us saying, Hey, we want the solution when we want to use it. Libby was one of our first customers, Toum, all these, startups that were in the same facility that were in the business park in Jordan at the time. And we just tried out stuff and, they caught onto it. Their customers were delighted.

, The voice, you know, communication was much better than most other, [00:07:00] means of communication. And we started expanding that 2019, we decided to split off, things. We bought out our investors in the previous business. There was an acquisition for Cash Basha and the asset of Cash Basha by Dubuy Group that then took it to Africa.

We're very happy with that. It's a great success story for us. Awesome. And then the genesis of MXAB came to be, and here we are. Was the ambition always — once you kinda discovered the size of the problem as it related to what MXAB was solving for, you thought this is what we wanna dedicate our time to.

Was there any temptation to continue both concurrently? Yeah. Lemme tell you, first of all, in Cash Basha. Like I said, the chain of payments, logistics, there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of billion dollar opportunities in fact, in that. And we were one of the first people, by the way, before Tabby and Tamara, to introduce buy now, pay later in the region.

Really? Yes. So on Cash Basha, we actually loaned out a few million dollars from our own balance sheet to be able to prove that buy now, pay later works. And we were incorporated in the DIFC FinTech Hive at the time, and we talked to DFSA and all these, was there even licensing available for There wasn't.

And still I think they told us that it wasn't, and they didn't know how to license it. And so we got [00:08:00] into this gray area with them. Sure. And, banks weren't like open to it. We had to have underwriting. The more money that you wanna lend out, obviously that you need, you need funding for it. And so that wasn't, available.

The small, you know, a hundred dollars, $200 tickets weren't an opportunity that they thought about. They wanted to do car loans , and home loans. And so, it took maybe someone like Hosam Arab to come in , and build that. Even if you ask Hosam, maybe one of the first, iterations of, buy now, pay later in the region was when I showed it to him at his office.

That's crazy. , When he was back at Namshi. Yeah. We're very good friends. They were also one of our first customers at MXAB as well. That's crazy. , So yeah, it's a small world and it's a very close-knit community that, that came together. But, that is a billion dollar opportunity.

Right. We said we, we tried this out. We had a product called Jaib — J-A-I-B, which means pocket in Arabic and also about nine other languages. Yep. , And then we went into actually trying to build out something in the, logistics space. And we had the telecommunication, you know, contact center as a service type of solution.

And we had to make a choice and we're like, listen, investors, look at us. We have too many things that we're running at the same time, we do have a profitable business. Got us where we are, we do have an exit. All that, all that stuff. Yes. But is this significant [00:09:00] enough to just focus on everything together and try and sell, different companies on, on trying to use this tool set?

Or do we focus on one thing and we try to make it massive And we know communication is one of those areas where like logistics, like payments, if you erase the borders, lots of magic can happen. We were also very intrigued because Sinan and I have worked at. International companies. So, I, my background is in data mining.

Originally I worked, as a director of, data mining at a company called Open Insights. Sinan was at, Google for many years, and we realized that the value of data and being able to train on a language like Arabic, which is a low resource language mm-hmm. In this part of the world, is super, super valuable.

And with all the international companies, not looking at the Arab world in that way and giving it, the light of day, we thought that we can come in and do something that's very special there. Build our own a SR. This is pre obviously the world that we live in today with, with AI becoming, you know, the next, generation , of change that's happening.

But we thought that we can build our own, speech to text analytics. , We can, find insights that are jewels for businesses, turn the profits, the cost center, to most companies into a profit center. And, that was the main goal. And, we thought that if we can have this distribution, we can build [00:10:00] all the layers that, are separately sold in the US by different companies like Twilio , and, all these different, players over there.

We can probably have a turnkey solution for the first time where a business is incorporated next day, they can have telephony across the region and can actually expand their businesses. So we are an economic engine for a lot of these companies in and in many different ways, either on the customer service side or on the sales side.

So we decided to spin off and, and, you know, jump into the deep end with, haven't looked back since. How what, sorry? Haven't looked back since. Haven't looked back since? No. Been, been going at it since 2019. No. Can you talk to me about your relationship with Sinan then? So you mentioned. You've been working together for quite some time.

Yeah. That's unusual in many respects that a co-founder relationship will persist for, for that length. Can you talk maybe about when you first met him, how that relationship has developed over time? Well, you worked so well together, because we're very different. I think that's, that's part of it. But, lemme take a step back.

, So Sinan was a, founding engineer at Jawaker.com, the the biggest card gaming website in the region. Yes. Sold for $220 million. Huge success story. , I was part of a company when I moved back from the States at the time, in the early 2000 tens, called D1G. It was [00:11:00] basically a rich media website for entertainment content and entertainment content.

Even on YouTube at the time was not in Arabic. It was very dispersed. And obviously we know the problem with the richness of the Arabic content on the internet — still below about 3%, I think, to 5%, is what most studies say. And so we used to have lunch together every day, in the cafe that was underneath our building.

Mm-hmm. , Coincidentally, our MXAB's office is right across the street from that building right now. But, we used to have lunch, every day because some of the engineers that D1G went to school with Sinan, and then, we became very close friends. I think what's special about this relationship that we have is that, it's not about, us being alike, it's more about us being different, as I said.

Mm-hmm. I'm very much a machine gun, and Sinan is very much a sniper. Okay. , The approach that we have to how we see problems, how we think about, different things, how we share the responsibility of, building a company together is, something that I think, completes each other. You know, it is very complimentary.

I can definitely tell you that, you know, starting a company is maybe a race in, you know, mental health and management. Yes. Disguised as a career path. Mm-hmm. And so when we think about things, we disagree a lot with each other, but we know that we have to [00:12:00] disagree and commit. And sometimes it's about, not about who's right, but who's turn it is right now to be right depending on the situation that we're in.

Context. Yeah. And so, . We know so many things about each other. We become great, great friends, brothers, and we see a long term, you know, development in us building more, more products and more companies. And he knows more than maybe, you know, my fiance or my mom Also in, we've been through a lot together, whether it's on the mental side or on the personal side.

Hmm. , You, you mentioned their decision making . , I'm curious about that. Is there any times where you've vehemently disagreed with each other? Oh, yeah. All the time. Drives me crazy. , I mean, somethings happen on the directions of the product sometimes, right?

Yes. So like, this is off the top of my head. , So, when we're. On different sides of the spectrum. I'm the type that wants to jump outta the plane. He is the type that maybe wants to do the logical, wise thing is like keep everything as it is and then make, you know, certain Yeah., Surgical enhancements that can actually get us to the next phase.

, So I'm always thinking about, all right, so we are in a world where we're building, lemme take a step back. There's two [00:13:00] worlds within every single company. Mm-hmm. Right? , There's the world that you're building today and the world that you need to prepare for in the future. Yes. Right? And the same thing goes from when you, kind of, go for funding, right.

You're pitching the present case. Mm-hmm. And you're promising a delightful future that's about to come around. , The difference between those two points is usually your integrity as a, as a founder overall. Yes. And what you fight for and what you try, try and do. Usually companies in my view, who don't do well long term, are the ones who, stay with the former state, which is trying to build for today, trying to make things work and all that, and don't actually take risks that are a bit more calculated.

So we built, different functions inside the, the company, whether it's a skunk works type of, department where we can actually experiment with things and do things, but we don't want to have it, you know, radically take over the rest of the, of the conformity that we have within the, the system.

And so we, we kind of mixed and matched on, different things, even if we had disagreements to kind of fulfill this journey that we're all going together and really, you know, allow for some, level of, not just differences, but experimentation, risk taking in calculated ways that I think, that my preference is [00:14:00] more, you know, to be a bit more radical .

I'm curious, you were very quick to pivot or lean heavily into, to ai. Was this one of these projects that you had running concurrently in the background? Never pivot by the way. , So AI was built from the, the genesis from the, from the except of MXAB. So when we were thinking about data, we weren't thinking about, you know, just collecting the data or harvesting the data.

We're thinking about what could we do with the data? What, what ing? Absolutely. So when the AI agent future that we are, you know, presently building, right now came about, it's an extension of what we were doing. We're simply bringing the AI that was already in the transcription of calls and the analysis of calls and the categorization of calls and the summarization, all the magic that we had in the backend, we're just bringing it to the forefront of the customer.

Sure. Right now in our conversation, so our sales pitch before was, Hey, come to us three minutes, we're gonna connect you to the world and we're gonna allow you to grow your business and you can connect it to your CRM and do all this magic stuff. Now the pitch is. We are a labor as a service company. Mm.

And labor as a service is what The attrition that you're experiencing within these very heavy call centers and, [00:15:00] and, and tough environments, is the opportunity that we, that we make. I mean, Jeff Bezos famously said, you know, your margin is my opportunity. Mm-hmm. And we famously say, hopefully fame, hopefully say, your attrition is our opportunity.

And I believe that there's a much more, functional way to running businesses with these technologies. Mm-hmm. The thing is. I feel like a lot of people look at AI as if it's a, something that's replacing jobs. And, and truly it is. There's no, denying that. And I think people who, give you bullshit answers about, you know, it augmenting only and all that, yes, it is augmenting, but it's gonna replace jobs in the long term.

Yeah, we should, we should definitely be very comfortable with that idea. I don't see why there is a, somehow a moral, obligation on AI companies to kind of save the market from this, from this happening of all the sudden you didn't hear that when people, you know, I don't know, like ba bank tellers, when, when, e you know, electronic banks came online mm-hmm.

Bank tellers went, went out of jobs, nobody said anything. , When Uber came to to be the taxi dispatchers went out of, out of business or that job was eliminated in, in very stressful environments, like,, assembly lines for, for car you know, [00:16:00] manufacturers or car factories. They, they replace with robots.

Nobody said anything about that. So why is there a particular moral obligation around ai? I think, I think it's inflated by the media quite a bit. , But I definitely do feel that it's important for us to realize that this is a replacement for bad jobs, not just any job. Right? Yes. And it's an upskilling of the human race over, over time.

And I think this is super important for us to kind of realize and, and kind of ponder on a little bit, because being in a call center eight hours a day with complaints coming through your ears is terrible for your mental state. It's, you know, some of these call centers have 10% per month attrition and, and, turnover.

Turnover of, of the employees. And that just isn't an environment that that should remain for a very long time. And I think it's gonna be, you know, but, but 2030 is when about 40 to 70% of all the activities inside of co center will be automated. , So we're close to getting there. With relation to , the extent to which maybe , the media has exacerbated things.

I think maybe it's now that it's encroaching on the knowledge economy, [00:17:00] more than it has in the past. And to your point for more. I don't wanna say mundane, but more repetitive jobs. Sure. You know, there, there isn't the same level of concern, but when, you know, when can write as well as a journalist , or when I can do these different things.

So when we talk about call centers, then, like what level and potentially there's an adverse effect, regionally in particular, and that we do have a lot of outsourced call support here as well. I think of Egypt in particular as maybe , a hub as far as that's concerned. Yeah. As much as it's not your moral obligation or imperative to, to have to be concerned about what we do, but do you still think about it, I suppose?

Oh yeah. We think about it all the time. We think about it all the time and we think about how, businesses, you know, or, or, or human labor, in particular will be dedicated towards more sophisticated type of, jobs. , And, and not completely eliminated and still augmented by ai. As I said earlier, we think about it in terms of, all right, if this change happens far too quickly.

Yes, I do think that there are entities and structures in governments mm-hmm. , Regulation, what have you, that should, you know, speak up and, and kind of, take [00:18:00] action. Do you think governments are asleep at the wheel? , I think they will not evolve as quickly as the technology that we're seeing is evolve.

I mean, ChatGPT was introduced in 2022 and now, look at where we are. Mm-hmm. , I still think we haven't seen the full agentic, AI promise that we've, yes, we've seen, I think, now the closest thing that I've seen over the past month is perhaps Claude Computer Use. I was just gonna say multiple as we supposed to come.

I haven't got, I don't know why they have an obsession with, lobster, you know, claws or, or whatever with this guy. But yeah, this guy, Pieter Steinberg, I think his name is, you know, it's crazy. Did you see him on TV? No. He did an interview. No, I didn't. We're checking out like half an hour. Guy is crazy.

Yeah, but it's insane. But, but what he's delivered is something that I think is, the big promise. It's a glimpse into the future. Yeah. Because everybody got excited and the hype is, is huge. This is terrible for, I think for markets in the short term. Yes. But back to the governments, usually what we see is that obviously technology's gonna, be fast, fast paced and, and, and, exceed the, the pace of regulation.

, But, but. In this particular case, I think it's gonna be much faster than anything we've seen before in terms of what it can take over. So Claude Computer Use, for example, has not just, implications on the, on the, the labor [00:19:00] side, but also on the security side. Yes, you are putting this onto your own personal device.

It's running natively on your device. There's amazing things. Mm-hmm. But imagine me through your WhatsApp application on your laptop here, I send you a, a prompt that is an injection and I can overtake your, machine at any point in time. So many vulnerabilities. And that's Yeah, lots of vulnerabilities, especially if you don't know what the hell you're doing.

Yes. And so a lot of people today are excited about this because Yes. Hype and all that, and people are getting Mac Minis and putting Claude Computer Use on it or, or multi-bot or what have you, and. It's, it's, really, leading to a lot of vulnerabilities and access to things that people didn't want. And, I think we're gonna live in a world where there is gonna be a dark time where, the naivete I think of the general public and, and, you know, the lack of regulation will, will unfortunately not meet in a place that, is gonna be very friendly.

What does your own AI use look like? Obviously, when the hype of ChatGPT started out, I was using ChatGPT quite quite frequently. I've since moved to more towards Claude. So have I uh, Claude is definitely I think superior on many fronts. I would tell you I've played around with obviously a lot of open source models.

Yeah. So OpenAI’s models and different things of that [00:20:00] nature. But but Claude has a reasoning, I think that is much more impressive and even me with mental conversations, you know, having yeah d different conversations and trying to really test out and try and challenge the, the bot.

It acts. Very close, obviously, to, to human behavior. We all know that these Ls are simply, you know, stochastic parrots, right? Yes. And, and they're predicting the next word. The next letter, the next you know, response that should, should, should happen, but. The illusion that we have, I think as, as humans, is that we build relationships that are intimate with these types of tools.

Mm-hmm. And that has never been introduced before. I think in in humanity. The, the relationship I have with Google or even Yahoo back in the day was, was, you know, just me getting entertained. The relationship with Google is me going to, similar to me going to the library. Mm-hmm. They're introducing things to me and I'm making my own deductions about what that's about.

But the opportunity, danger and relationship that's quite intimate with these LLMs is that I'm speaking to them and they're becoming my friend and they're becoming my other tool that I'm using and they're becoming my [00:21:00] opinion if you, if you will. So I'm asking particular things and it's giving me a direct answer, and that's becoming, you know, the source of truth.

So this can be super dangerous. I think the future when you're talking about political opinions you know, directions, even preserving culture, I think. That's going to be done in LLMs rather than just books and, and the minds of people. And this is why I would assume or I mean, I would hope not assume, actually, I would hope the initiatives that are being done in the region yes.

Whether they're Jais or whether they're the ALLaM LLM or whether they're any particular sovereign LLMs. And I think every country should actually experiment with this. Is that the preservation of culture moving forward. Will happen through these types of of reasoning models. It's, it's you know, humans traditionally have done that through speech at first.

Yeah, right. So, so language I'm forgetting the name of the of the researcher right now off the top of my head. But language was first discovered about 500,000 to a million years ago. Text was only discovered about 150,000 years ago. And, you know, other forms of [00:22:00] communication, you know, only about like keyboards have only been around for like 150 years and so, and so the evolution of whether it's voice or how culture is, is transferred over has, is, you know, not changed for a very, very long time.

But I think this is the first time where it's going to be done digitally through these particular mediums. A ton to unpack there. Can we start with voice? Do you think that would be the more natural mode of communication with AI moving forward into the future? I find it myself. I use Whisper, I dunno if you're familiar with this, of.

I, I can't remember the last time I wrote anything. How do you use Whisper for everything? So, so I mean, you mean through ChatGPT, you just use the voice abuse it. If I'm creating a Yeah. Google Doc, I will whisper, I will do the entire thing. Yeah. And that if I'm asking a prompt, even if it's on Claude Gemini chat, pt, I will do it via Whisper.

And I suppose it's all about context. Okay. It's the amount of information that you can supply. Yeah. There's a tendency I think, when you're typing, you're like, do this. Yeah. Please. Yeah. I don't mind chatting. I will provide as much context as is required. Yeah. I'm happy to chat. You know, the, I think the context in there for Whisper for is like six minutes.

Yeah. I [00:23:00] can't tell you the amount of times that I've exceeded that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think no, I'll actually, I'll actually tell you my opinion on this. It's is if you look back into human nature, Hmm. You identify your mother's voice within moments of being born. Mm-hmm. You identify their face. Within I think weeks of, of being born voice is naturally something that humans have gravitate, gravitated towards.

It is the best form of communication and I would argue it's not just the first one that we learn or we've learned as a human race, but it's also going to be the last. Interface mm-hmm. That we actually use. The next best thing is gonna be telepathy. Right. And that needs a whole different slew of things that we can you know, dive in.

Elon will get there at some place. Right? So the Neuralink is, is, is, is all into that, but arguably the best interface is voice, just because it's the easiest way to express yourself. I mean, if you think, if you're talking to your, you know, your life partner or anyone else mm-hmm.

How many times over chat have you misunderstood each other and have to put in emojis or whatever the emotive Yeah. There, she's, she's sitting here off camera. [00:24:00] But uh, but yeah. You know, voice is the most emotive medium. Mm-hmm. It's also the fastest medium to communicate what you want and potentially get an uh, a, a, a result for years.

I think, you know, why, why are alums so important is because prior to LLMs coming into the world, we had to figure out. Machine speak. Mm-hmm. Right. We had to put in commands, prompts, code, what have you now hu the machines, you know, know the human speak. And so that is where this innovation is, is just so important.

And we are expressing ourselves the exact way that we want. Mm. And we are able to kind of, do things much, much quicker through, through, through voice overall and especially in our part of the world that is the preferred yes. Medium. There was a time I think where a lot of people saw that, you know, chat, message messaging became a big deal.

Mm-hmm. Especially with businesses. So, so sometime where WhatsApp was introduced, a lot of different businesses like Intercom and others, for example, came onto the scene, did very well. On the chat interface with, with with businesses and thought that that was gonna be the end of call centers and, and what have you.

But lo and behold, here we are companies like [00:25:00] Intercom and many others are going back to voice. Yeah. Fin I mean, they're Exactly, exactly. Because you need an omnichannel presence that is commanded by, by, by voice. And, and that changes I think, the game when it comes to customer service specifically, or even sales.

So, yeah, voice is going to be king for a very, very long time. It's nice to have someone to shout out. Yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. Absolutely. Especially from a customer support perspective. Yeah. I mean, it's important to speaking to Jamal from Jeeny previously, previously with Jeeny in Saudi.

And to his point, he said this was so important from a customer's support perspective,, the taxi drivers wanted to have someone that they could shout down the phone out, and maybe they didn't have that to the same extent maybe at that time with Uber or, or Cream, for example, sovereign Models, which we touched on there.

They seem like something that's. Happening the periphery to, or we're not really interacting with them. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned that they're gonna be quite important, but , am I going to be interacting with any of these models at any point?

Am I gonna have a cause to do that? Yes, the answer is yes. I think in certain silos they won't be as popular as you know, the, the frontier models that you, you'll be interacting with. For sure. But um, [00:26:00] if you talk to Dubai Police, I think that is already Jais that you're talking to. Okay.

If you are in Saudi Arabia talking to the Ministry of Interior then some of the services are on ALLaM today. Even when you take a look at our company Mm. You know, sometimes we, we've developed with our own and fine tuned our own models and many other businesses are doing the same, but we do know where if you're building something that's differentiated, that's important.

And where sometimes data sovereignty is, is a big deal and you have to deploy locally, that's also going to be important. But we don't shy away from knowing that if there's something that's better on the shelves, make sure you implement it in the right way. Yes. And you don't kind of, redesign the the wheel, rebuild the wheel.

This is something that's available to everyone. Mm-hmm. And I think that's part of the reason why you know, a lot of the the models that are being built by, by these sovereign, you know, entities are not getting enough popularities because the distribution is has not been presented the same way they've been done top down by government.

They haven't put into applications, no, they haven't been really deployed in a way that is that is going to be touching every single citizen the same way these sovereign models will. Yeah. A dry press release is not quite the same exactly. As for sure. Exactly. We've touched on models there, so [00:27:00] it'd be remiss not to touch on your own models, which I know you've been developing for quite some time.

Yeah. Before it was popular in mainstream. Can, can you talk to that? Can you talk to me about the process from when you first started training models? Absolutely. So, so the first thing we did was a text to sorry, speech to text model. Mm. So we wanted to transcribe the voice calls that were happening on our platform and be able to analyze them.

And obviously Arabic was really underperforming. Yes. Even with open source models like Whisper and others, they were not trained on an Arabic data set. And so we had a golden data set that we had from our own business sort. So from Cash Basha days and, and all that. And Okay. Some other data sources that we had the proprietary access to and, and even the consent of yes, some of the customers that we work with to, to actually use some of that data and train for them.

And we were able to build a golden data set, which took a huge team that we had to put in together and annotate and properly label all that together. So we got to this golden dataset and we've been able to outperform some of the international companies at the, at at Arabic language in particular.

Can I ask that, how long did that take? The process of quite a while at that time, obviously it's much easier to do this course. Right now, thankfully, we have uh, uh, great advisors and early investors in our company who work [00:28:00] at OpenAI and also speak Arabic and know the, the nuances of Arabic. And they were able to help us and guide our AI research team to be able to do that.

And we put out some academic papers on that front that we're proud of. But um, you know, we were able to outperform these models and I don't think it's difficult for anyone else to outperform these models. These models. By the way uh, you know, any company that comes in says, you know, we're 97% accurate, in Arabic and whatever those companies should.

You know, shoot themselves in the face because Yeah. What's the deal with benchmarking? Can we talk about this? Because I think it's so immature. I think it's so immature that you know, you come you, I mean, media headlines are great. Yeah. But, but I mean, if you, if you really know the technology, you know, that, you know, English doesn't have that high of an accuracy rate for you to have a, have that in Arabic.

So, I mean, good on them if they were able to do it. But, but honestly, it's not about the the accuracy of the speech to text models. It's about what are the resolution rates that you have when servicing your customers. And that doesn't necessarily rely on accuracy that's very high mm-hmm. In speech to text models.

But it does actually rely on good training within the reasoning models that you have and the functions that go into the outputs of that reasoning. [00:29:00] A lot of people look at the aesthetics of the model. So of course, any AI agent has three main components. The first one is speech to text. Mm-hmm. The second one is the LLM, the reasoning side of things.

And then the third one is text to speech, which you have this full voice model pipeline put together and to get a good result. It doesn't mean that I'm producing it in the, you know, the local accent. It doesn't mean that I'm having a hundred percent accuracy on the on the, the, the front of the top of the line.

It's really about what is happening on the reasoning state. There. That makes a huge difference there. So when you take a look at companies, and even if you were to invest in a company today and what have you, where are your your data flywheels, where are the propriety data sets that you have?

Where are the integrations that you have that are, you know, not not typical integrations? Are you using things that are off the shelf or not? That does not matter. Yes. It really matters whether you're going to be a mature technology team that understands that resolution rates and being able to get to a low frustration experience with a customer is more important than anything else.

That's, you can call, yeah, you can call a bank here in the UAE there's a popular one that everybody you know, doesn't like their AI agent that they had for [00:30:00] many, many years. Yeah. And you know, you'd have a terrible experience because it wouldn't understand what you're saying, it wouldn't actually do what you want.

That has since changed quite a bit now with the advent of ai. But obviously there are a lot of traumas in the market too. Mm-hmm. And a lot of companies on the other side are using that trauma. That's embedded into the minds of all these professionals to get these headlines and, and and get in bed with with some of these the clients.

All right. And that's all good and dandy. They will sell, they will do very well, of course. But then again, you're looking at a market where this is new technology. There is a, a lot of, there’s a lot of skepticism. Right? And I think why there's a lot of disappointments is because a lot of these companies are dreaming the big dream that has been promised, and the levels of accuracy that have been put in the headlines and then are very soon to be very disappointed very quickly.

The reality doesn't quite match up. Exactly. So, that is, I think, one of the main things. Beyond that, the companies themselves are not ready for this conversion that's happening, right? So the companies themselves don't have the knowledge bases written the proper ways that can be ingested by these models.

And they the, you know, take the actions that they want or have the [00:31:00] responses that they want. They focus on the aesthetics first, and then they don't get into the nitty gritty want. They realize that this is a big undertaking. They're like, oh, oh, oh, wait, wait, wait. Keep the humans for a bit and we'll, we'll take this over.

So I don't think the ai change is gonna happen in the next year, for example. Right. We are seeing today, according to Gartner, it's by 2022. In 2022, we had 21% automation. Yes. However, it'll go up to about 75% by 2030. But yet again, this is in western markets where language is not an issue. Lots of competition, lots of distribution infrastructure's not an issue.

Right in this part of the world, you're dealing with a whole different animal. It's gonna take a little bit longer. There will be much more progress on many impressive things. But don't sell me on a demo. Yeah. Sell me on something that's actually gonna be you know, where we're positioned, for example, as a full stack solution.

Yep. We're giving you the numbers, the contact center platform for human agents and for your AI agents, and then the analysis on top of it that actually allows you to grow as a business and I think this labor as a service. Kind of mentality angle Yes. And angle that we have is [00:32:00] what separates the hopefully the companies that outlast the potential bubbles that might happen or, or what have you.

I mean, a lot of these businesses good on them, that they're able to raise a lot of money. Yes. But you know, the default state that they have if things go down is you know, they don't have the customers. Mm-hmm. And they're just building out right now. They're selling them on the dream. Number two, if there is a bubble at the burst, they'll default to bankruptcy.

We will default to thousands of customers in tens of countries thankfully in, in hundreds of millions of calls being processed with AI embedded into that. Yes. And potentially being able to outlive the doomsday scenario that many of them will be erased by. And so, I mean. I'm sure you might ask me like, do you believe that there's a bubble that's gonna happen or whatever?

We'll get to that some point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, if I were to, to project my answer a little bit here, go for uh, yeah. Uh, I, I would tell you that I, I do hope there is some level of correction ish in the market. I don't think we'll, we'll see a, a massive bubble that that bursts the same way we saw earlier, I think in the history of the technology industry.

But for sure there should be some level of of I think maturity that [00:33:00] needs to happen. And the companies that are able hopefully to to outlive that scenario, and hopefully we're one of them will, will, will do well, eventually the C-Suite are gonna start asking for where, where are these incredible results that you told me were for the market for them?

Yes. I mean, the market, if you take a look at the US market for example, there's a lot of skepticism around the hype that has been promised. Yeah. Talk to me about resolutions how does the PREE agent world compare to now the world we live in as far as. Customer queries being resolved, is this like a step change in terms of improvement or is it Okay?

No, it's, it's a sort of cost arbitrage scenario whereby we can maintain the same level, but for much, much cheaper. What are we talking about there? So, the numbers from research that I've found at least and again, these are western numbers. Sure. Might, we might have to kind of, discount them a little bit.

Caveat yes. For the region, but it would cost a contact center call in general, it cost the company about six to $12 to resolve that call. Hmm. If you have a ticket, and especially if you're in government or enterprise, that goes up to $40. So imagine $40 for you to be [00:34:00] able to resolve one particular ticket.

'cause it's gonna take time to get, you know, make calls back and forth. The human agent is there, the systems that they're using are there, yeah. The calls can pile up, but the company doesn't see it that way. Obviously there's a call center that has to be there, but if you go into the nitty-gritty details, it's that expensive.

Right. When you're looking at an agentic world, you're talking about about half a dollar to a dollar to do the same exact re. Significant. Absolutely significant. And in terms of the cost structure, I mean, that's something that you know, we would have to battle with every day because you know, the, the it only makes business sense for, for people who are in the C-Suite Yeah.

To, you know, change the orientation of what your sales and support people are doing to be able to save the company. It's, I think, the responsibility of those individuals to repurpose a lot of those savings. Into reskilling the individuals that are in the company, being able to come up with different jobs.

A simple example would be if I was a call center agent. Mm-hmm. And I, you know, am eliminated you can use me again for training more. 'cause I'm a skilled call center agent. I've dealt with customers, I know what the problem are, but you can [00:35:00] upskill me to be able to retrain some of the models that are specific to our you know, type of business.

And you know, these general templates that you find online with some companies, they don't actually fulfill everything that has to do with your particular business. And there are a lot of nuances that you know, are, are involved in that. And I don't think it's gonna be a massive issue where we see a huge change where big changes happen in, in in reskilling.

That's, that's needed for example. Yes. If I believe the statistic is you know, the, the 40% of jobs around the world require you to drive a vehicle. Wow. 40%. If that change happens very, very quickly. Especially at the level of people working or education or, or what have you, or the level of society working in those jobs, I think you're gonna have a big problem.

And that's when I think the, the governments will have to definitely step in. It's a big market for Waymo. You're really reinforcing Waymo, Tesla, every one of these guys, right? So, so massive opportunities. And I think it's gonna be atypical solutions that bring this together. How are you going to do it?

A lot of people talk about minimum income and Yes. And things global, global, universal, universal income. And I think that's gonna take a [00:36:00] while to kind of, flesh that one off. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Be effective. Even we talked about cost there and cost of resolution. It, it makes sense to talk about pricing at this point as well, because AI has precipitated outcome-based pricing like we haven't seen before.

Yeah. Are you guys practicing out outcome-based pricing at the moment? Can you talk to me about how sure things have changed? Sure. I think that is an eventual future that, that we will mostly land at. We have experimented with some models that we took a look with our numbers and that makes sense on outcome-based pricing.

Yes. It's similar to when you think about pay per click advertising. Yeah. Right. So pay per click advertising you're paying for per performance. If I'm implementing an agent I would definitely want to lower the barrier mm-hmm. Of, of entry into a company, have it live there and if it doesn't solve the problem, then you don't pay me.

Yep. If it does solve the problem, then you pay me very handsomely and at scale. That is a lot of money. Mm-hmm. For us, we are currently on the consumption pricing standard. Sure. Right. Which has been hereditary norm business. Yep. And I think in the place that we're in, in the market, that [00:37:00] is more understandable to a lot of customers than actually having outcome-based pricing.

Mm-hmm. Because there is skepticism around the AI market overall. I do know of other businesses that are doing package based okay. Not outcome pricing based pricing, but actual package. Mm-hmm. Based pricing where here's a number of AI minutes and you can consume them over a different period of time.

People understand that a bit more because they're used to the telco based pricing generally, and I think going all the way to outcome based pricing. It might, Going cold turkey is too abstract at the moment you want. Exactly, yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah. You want to, to simplify it to a certain extent.

Okay. Let's talk about fundraising then. Sure. You don't make a big song and dance about funding, which is unusual regionally. Why are you guys so qu? We thought that, um. it wouldn't aid us in any particular way by, you know, announcing our numbers and how much we raised, especially in a market that already has potential competitors that we've been able to, you know, outgrow and and kind of get to a point of you know, a, a good business, a good business is a good, is is a good business.

We haven't raised a lot of money, I think, compared to a lot of businesses. Thankfully. We have achieved profitability and we've been able to grow out the business and, and [00:38:00] the metrics quite, quite a bit. And we're lucky, I think to be able to be in that position and choose who we wanna partner with and choose, you know, the, the position that we're that we're in.

But yeah, I thought, I thought it would be anticlimactic to our overall story if we had just went out in, in the world and said, Hey, we raised. You know, XA hundred thousand dollars or, you know, our first round and a few million, our second round. And, and that's all we did. We only raised those, those two rounds.

And and, and yeah, I mean, we didn't find the need for it. I think there's no particular strategy that is beyond, you know what, let's get away from all this hype and get, keep our heads down and make sure that we build a great product that people actually need. And businesses like us and like other mission critical type of of infrastructure, they're not very sexy.

You know, at the beginning I think we're now much sexier with Yes. With the adv. Yes. All of a sudden AI and all that, all of a sudden. But I mean, if you take a look historically yeah. You guys are doing call centre stuff and whatever. That's, that's not super sexy. That's not like, buy now, pay later, we're giving you free money and, and, and all that stuff.

And so we thought that let's keep it on the low key Yep. And make sure that we can grow out the business and capture [00:39:00] potential pieces of the market. But we continue to do that strategy. I don't know. Mm-hmm. I think when you get to larger rounds of funding, it's the investors and the yes, the, the pr glitz and glam that a lot of people want to come to, but we would remain wanting to be a company that is, is gung ho on, on what we're doing today and trying to promise future executing and just, yeah.

You touched on competition. There is becoming increasingly crowded. How do you think about competition? Our competitors are our greatest allies. Actually. I'm so happy with my competitors that are best, our best salespeople expand. I mean, a lot of these companies end up doing such a terrible job on the infrastructure side and on the sales side and on the support side that a lot of their customers come to us because they want the solution, but they're not happy with the pears, the, well, the company that they're working with.

I respect a lot, don't get me wrong. I respect our competition. Sure. And they only validate our market move for further and further. And depends on who we're competing with. Again, the stack that we, it's, it's a good point we built is, is four layered, right? Yeah. So we have the infrastructure, the contact centers as a service, the analytics, and then the AI agents.

So you'll [00:40:00] find a lot now with the glitz and glam of, of AI agents on the top but not doing the rest. Mm-hmm. And a lot of these players are allies as I said because they integrate into our infrastructure, they integrate into our systems. And when the agent doesn't know how to answer, well, you have to send the call to a human.

And where does that happen? On a cloud platform like us. So we have a lot of the the local players now, whether in Saudi, the UAE Egypt, even integrated into our platform and taking use of a lot of the infrastructure that we've built so they can give a better service to their customer. And we're happy to be part of that critical infrastructure that makes their business work.

We don't necessarily wanna cut them off and say, you know what, we're only exclusive. We only do things in house. And that's the strategy of other companies that we've seen that don't necessarily do well. And we want to be able to kind of accommodate a better AI coverage and, and see whether, you know, our own models.

Hopefully at the one point in time our preferential to customers that they would actually come over themselves. I see a lot more voice orchestration platforms. Yeah. At the moment. How does that fit in with you [00:41:00] guys? How does that compliment or does it jar with, or what I, I, I, I'm trying to figure this out and I thought best, best to ask you.

You, you've better, better idea than I do. Well, I'll, I'll tell you. I mean, voice orchestration is something that everybody's gonna end up doing, right? Mm-hmm. So you're gonna have to orchestrate multiple agents together if you take a actual call center and how it actually lives today. Yeah. You have different personalities, different people.

Somebody’s named Fuad, somebody named Jamie, you know, Mohammed, whoever. And I think people are wanting that type of experience of variety. You don't wanna talk to the same voice all the time when I call into the company distinct personalities. Exactly. Exactly. But there might be preferences for me to deal with one particular mm-hmm.

Person who's like my best friend within the company and, and service servicing me or with all I want. But you know, those voice orchestration workflows and, and, and, and platforms are becoming clearly a way that you can expand and integrate a lot more of your your services with, within companies.

So that's, that's something that I think is inevitable to happen. And you see a lot of different players coming about internationally that there's no barrier to entry, I think, into that market particularly a lot of people can just integrate that into your own workflow and, and, and and make use of it.

Not much to say there, honestly. And I think it's just inevitable that you [00:42:00] have all these different components When you take a look at the topology of how an AI agent works, that you actually do need this multi-layered you know, agent kind of, workflow, that'll, that'll help you kind of resolve many things, especially when you have large knowledge bases.

Yes, you'd want multiple agents focusing on different areas of that, even if you hear the same voice on the other end. But to be able to reduce latency, to be able to make sure that you're servicing customers even, even better. You wanna make sure that those agents have particular smaller sub chunks of those knowledge bases that they're able to, to kind of cater to.

How does the experience compare for a customer or a client coming to you where maybe their knowledge base isn't quite up to scratch or it's not very well structured? Is that a much heavier lift? Absolutely. It is a much heavier lift, but it depends. So if a customer is already using MXAB, for example mm-hmm.

It's pretty much we've built a model Yes. That already has all of your recordings in the cloud. And so you press the button and it'll come up with the initial knowledge base that that you need and that with something that you you can customize and change as needed. We're building also a training ground within our [00:43:00] platform that can actually allow you to change different things over time and kind of speak, chat with the model itself and what have you.

But, but really, I'm very proud to say that we've had some examples where, you know, this one click knowledge based generation, the customer only had to change one. Out of pages, upon pages of the knowledge base, they only had to change one line. And, and they were able to use it automatically in their, in their own in their own AI agent.

So, so, why do I go back to saying, you know, what's the maturity of the product? Where are your data moats? Where are the the, the flywheels? How are you building applications on top of it that actually lower this barrier of entry into customers, I think is what's gonna allow for more distribution and a smaller lead time to getting to market.

There are a lot of solutions I think they can help but mostly I'm surprised of the amount of or the lack rather of documentation inside companies and even government entities that absolutely do not have any documentation about how they work. And so this is an opportunity for a lot of businesses, I think, to kind of, do some spring cleaning on the inside and kind of, up their game, make sure that they have the right documentation and the right knowledge [00:44:00] basis, because it's gonna really, really change the way that they work.

You've been at the coalface of, model developments over the course of the last number of years. , Has MXAB benefited from those step changes over time? , What is the ceiling that we can reach within our company or within models in general?

Both your company first. So we focus very clearly at customer service Yes. And outreach, right? So we're not trying to do everything under the sun. We wanna make sure we're, we're, we're focused on those to be able to predict what a customer wants before they even call in, or they, and that, I think that would be the ultimate evolution of our product.

We wanna make sure that you know, you don't have to kind of realize that you need something from your bank or you might like the stock or what have you for you to buy it, or or if you have a problem, you wanna be able to predict those predictive. Okay. So if you're talking about predictive analysis within and reasoning, if we know enough about your behavior and that's fed into the models, we initially think that that's gonna be the, the, the way of the future.

Globally, I think, you know, there. When's AGI, yeah. I think that's really far out much further than than than what, you [00:45:00] know, the, the headlines will say a lot of, I mean, you hear 2029 being, being that that number. But I think what is AGI is is the big question still. Do we think that models are gonna come up with theoretical you know, scientific theory?

Yes. Innovation and science, biotechnology? Yes. I think very, very clearly humans have an ability that mm-hmm. This technology, even if it seems yes, human-like, just does not have, I think being able to string multiple ideas together to come up with a net new concept novel, that yes, novel idea is something that they won't come up with.

I mean, do you think a model will come up with the you know, theory of relativity you know, out, out of the blank? You know, it's, it's been trained on a certain dataset. You know, if that dataset is not novel, that's a whole different problem. But if it's on dataset, it's gonna predict the next.

Page of that data set, and will that data set actually have a whole new idea that wasn't used before? I think we're a bit further away from it doing that. And do we think it's gonna do it on its own? I think is when know what people expect. So is AGI gonna come in and then we have this orb entity?

Yes. That is [00:46:00] going to all of a sudden spew out HAL — yeah, HAL, for example. But spew out all these new concepts that we haven't seen before. I, I don't know. There's a lot of controversy within this AGI issue because if we are creating something that's gonna be smarter than us, then how's that any different from, you know, a deity or a potential religious figure, for example?

I'm not getting into too controversial here, maybe, but, but, but, but seriously, I mean, what are the differences? It's gonna give us, it's all knowing. It's gonna give us all the answers. We're gonna start reacting to it as if this is a yes. Yeah. A higher power. Yes. It doesn't have a physical form. It's Well, yeah.

I, well, I mean form, I mean, pretty You're lot. This is a good, this is a good point. Yes. We're all going to have helpers with some description, Android or humanoid or, or whatever it may be, or girlfriend. I think there's, I think there's, I think there's a, there's, there's some of those already. I think we certainly won't into, I, I don't want this flagged Human humans are weird, man.

Let's not get this flagged by YouTube. As, as, as much as we can. I think we'll think we'll avoid that. You've been increasingly spending time in, in Saudi as well. Mm-hmm. How's that going for you? Fantastic. I live in [00:47:00] Saudi are you full-time in Saudi now? Yeah, yeah. I live in Riyadh and I travel throughout the region.

We have offices in, in multiple countries, but but Saudi is obviously, you know, where Ronaldo lives. So, that's great points. So if you wanna, if you wanna play with in the big leagues. Yep. You wanna go where Ronaldo is, and I think totally fair. That's, that's, that's where it is in, in different industries.

So, so I’m kidding, no. Yeah. But, but Riyadh has been a amazing, you know, place to watch because I first went to Riyadh in 2010 and it was a very different beast. You know, a sleeping giant, as many people will say for many, many years. And now things have changed drastically, whether it's on the cultural side Yep.

Or, or otherwise. But opening up to the rest of the world and seeing the influx of attention. Has been, has been really, really amazing to see the vision that vision 2030 or the vision of His Royal Highness MBS overall and also being able to actually have proper, for example AI infrastructure in the country.

Yes, I think there is a lack of places around the world that have the political power, the financial capabilities, and also the space to be able to build so much. It's, it's happening at [00:48:00] light speed. I think you know, I, I, I just have my fingers crossed that everything goes well in the region and, and, and they achieve what they're looking for.

And I do think that a lot of things are happening ahead of schedule in terms of the achievements of the 2030 vision and, and, and what have you. And they are putting the money, their money, where the mouth is. I, I also do believe that they will need more help. So, so the world is coming to Riyadh mm-hmm.

In a very, very new way. And there's a concentration of attention and, and financial gain from, from being there. I never thought I would move to Riyadh you know, back in my 2010 sure brain, especially full-time. But there's a wonderful li life there with a great bustling startup scene. And and Saudi entrepreneurs are absolutely amazing.

They've done great work. They are learning super, super quick. Not that we come with any, we're all learning together, of course. I mean, we don't have any particular advantage over anyone me being Jordanian originally, but, yeah, I, I think there's a lot that has to change, I think in terms of the, the venture capital side of, of Riyadh.

And you know, and Arabic venture capital is, is [00:49:00] adventure. And so I think people need to have a bit more appetite towards risk and, and really doing things that are that are a bit more radical. There's nothing that splits us away from the people who are in Silicon Valley. Yes. It's just the mentality that's, that's there and the overall level of competition and the way that the mindset is, is, is put together that or the mental model of actually being an entrepreneur is, is, is, yeah.

Super important. Is there anything to that point that you'd like to receive more funding or that you'd like more investors to take a punt on that you think maybe there's reluctance to at the moment or to us personally? Yeah. No, just, just generally. Sorry. Just generally as, as, as an ecosystem, I think. As an ecosystem.

A lot of people look at me and they say are you guys a Saudi company? And I think that's something that pisses me off. This is a big thing. Yes. I think it pisses me off. Yeah. I've talked to quite a few people for all the right reasons. Yes. Right. And, and it's not about Saudi, it's about first of all, what makes you a Saudi company or not?

And I think if you take a look at, generally in the world, if somebody starts a business in Europe and then moves to Boston or California or everywhere, you [00:50:00] know, and they grow their business and they have most of their customers in a particular market and you know, they start hiring from that particular market.

If the founder is not, you know, American Yes. Does that not make it an American company? It's a great point. I think you see the same thing of an example — Stripe or Intercom, like Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So for us you know, we are clearly not Saudi founders, but very proud to be in Saudi Arabia, proud to be in the region.

I think unfortunately over the years. Again, back to the fragmentation of the region there's an identity crisis and who owns what and, and what have you. Recently there was a a Nobel Prize winner. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And you had three or four countries. This is quite fighting over him.

Yes, I think Saudi won, but but in the end, yeah, yeah, yeah. In the end. But again, people were claiming left to right and center was Palestinian, Jordanian American yeah. And, and Saudi. So, I think we should be proud of that diversification and take a look at the MENA region overall as a unified market.

This is obviously me talking of course, you know, unrealistically in, in [00:51:00] present times, in political you know, situation over the, over the over years. But I do hope that we can have a unified identity somehow. Again, we speak the same language. Different dialects. I understand cultural differences very slight.

Sure. Mm-hmm. But because I don't dress the same way, it doesn't mean that I'm not part of this in contributing heavily into this particular market. And, and it makes me proud to, to, to be there. And I'm happy to be able to call our company a MENA-based company. Yes. Built with love in MENA, you'll see that on every I have seen webpage that we have and and, and we believe that's the, the right message.

I want to ask you about Jordan as well, because I hadn't realized how intimately involved with the startup ecosystem. There, you, you had been, I was chatting to Ibrahim Maanna from BRKZ. Oh yeah. And he mentioned you were quite an integral part of Tech Tuesdays. Yes. In Aman all the way back in the day.

Can you? Yes. And so was he? Yes. And, and many other people. So I had moved back to the region in the early 2000 tens. I was in Boston. Mm-hmm. And every day you'd had an event that were, you know, that brought together either startup ecosystem or a particular [00:52:00] scientific ecosystem, or there was something exciting to do every single day.

And I just realized that this cross pollination was happening between all these groups was so valuable. That shaped my thinking, how I was exposed to different companies, how I was exposed to different founders, how some of their advice to me kind of. Gave me shortcuts into building a company and, and you know, avoiding obstacles and what have you.

When I came back to Jordan, you had great companies coming outta Jordan. You know, technically I would, I would, I would maybe overstep the boundaries and say that, you know, Jordan was a hotbed for many, many years looking back. I mean, insane density state. Yeah. The Gulf talent and the engineering talent in most telco companies or, or even startups today.

Venture capital as well. Venture capital as well. Yes, yes. You know, happened from, from Jordan, we had a great educational program that you know, gave a lot of engineering talent to all of these companies. And you know, we had the first acquisitions, we still probably have you know, the most significant acquisitions that happened actually started from, from from Jordan.

And in the early 2000 tens, it was a very, very special time where there's a lot of excitement, a lot of new investors coming around, and we thought that it would be great to have a grassroots type of event happening. So we called it, AmmanTT — Amman Tech Tuesdays. It happened on [00:53:00] the first Tuesday of every month.

And went on for 10 years. From 2010 till 2020. Wow. Right. Where Corona came in. Something happened that year. So else, yeah, something happened that year. Exactly. But every year on our anniversary. We, it was obviously not sponsored. It was all grassroots. We you know, our first event had 400 people. Then we grew up to about a thousand people per event.

And it was just people interested, enthusiastic about learning and, and being able to mingle. And you know, when I go into a lot of meetings today, people like, oh, I attended Tech Tuesdays. I remember you from there. Or, you know, it was great for our exposure overall. But what I wanted to to say is that we got off to about 40,000 attendees.

Wow. Over, you know, aggregate over over 10 years. And it became like one of the big pillars of, of I think Amman's tech scene that people looked forward to. And I didn't expect it. But Ibrahim was one of the people where when I put out on Twitter that, Hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing. He showed up he was doing a bunch of different startups, some failed, some worked.

Yes. And, and things of that nature. I met a lot of other people that I wasn't exposed to. I think before having lived in the Amman bubble that I was a part of, or even being in the States and coming back [00:54:00] and just seeing how the internet was shaped in the minds. Of other people, whether it's cultural or technical or otherwise.

And I'm so proud of that being part of my journey and it was completely extracurricular type of activity. Yeah. See, see the legacy of that today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think it was important that you know, we realized that neither I or Ibrahim or many of the other great people who were part of that you know, non-for-profit activity Yes.

You know, owned it. It was completely owned by the community. Everybody contributed. If I wasn't there, still went on. And I think when you. Think about startups and, and your worth in the business. It's very important for you to be able to be completely useless at some point in time and, and have people take things on and get out the way of of how things can, can go.

Still miss it. A lot of people will say that you know, bring it back. We started back. Yeah. But it's, it's it's a lot to deal with. I think. I've paid my dues on you know, things that it's for the community and I think someone else's turn taken on and not, not just that someone else's turn, but I think we're contributing more by MXAB.

I always, all these guys, and I'm so proud of all these businesses by being able to. Either invest in each other's companies Yes. Or even just have these companies grow [00:55:00] and, and employ more people who came to those events who, you know, were interested in, in college at the time, and just transferred over into you know what?

It's, and I have a very nice photo of the home brew computer club in California black and white photo. It's a auditorium with people who, you know, are very techie coming together on a frequent basis in California. You know, talking about all these computers at the time, personal PCs at the time, and a photo right next to it of AmmanTT is, are almost identical, right?

And so yeah, simple format, 20 minutes for people to give talks. There were three talks and then a panel and coffee and tea and, and off you go to the next month. It's fantastic. I've seen, I dunno when it was, I went down an awful rabbit hole and that's actually frustrating out that you were, part of it was, I saw like a photo, it was a video from, I dunno.

Oh wow. Where I stumbled across this, I went down pretty deep. Oh, the dark web. Something like that. Sure. What was, so was Twitter the, the main sort of, was that the social network or thing were happening? Yeah, yeah. Twitter was just coming out to the scene. Yeah. And there was a group of people who were doing tweet up in Amman.

Okay. And you know, there was a certain group who [00:56:00] were just enthusiastic about social media at the time. Facebook was a completely different thing. I think people who were on Facebook at the time and people were on Twitter were not the same type of people. Different personalities, but Yeah. Yeah. So you'd find a bit more active activist types on, on, on, on Twitter, for example, people who were not there for entertainment.

Yes. But there to add something you know, VCs and, and things of that nature. So, yeah, that was the group that spun out many, many things actually. And, and I, not just I adding to this. Okay. Maybe a ping question then. Very basic. What are we most excited about, considering we're recording in January for 2026?

What, what are we most excited about? So, going back to I think Claude Computer Use honestly I think it's one of the most exciting promises of what agen AI could be. Mm-hmm. And because it comes with so many challenges, I think on the political, on the security side and what people might end up doing, I think there's a lot of puzzles that need to be solved there.

I would say that being able to take that into a format that is actually something that your mother could use yes. Right, would be something that would change her life without her even knowing this exists today. I [00:57:00] would probably put money down that definitely my mother does not know anything beyond chat.

GPT doesn't even know what AI is capable of, but when she sees something where she can actually have automations that do things for her, her groceries are automated. Her you know, different tasks are automated, maybe recording her favorite TV show automatically, and it just learns how to be her.

Assistant and friend. I think that'll change all of our lives and kind of augment where we're going. So, I think that's a big part of what'll change over the next phase, potentially this year and maybe part of next year. Love it. Patriots fan. Yes. Best of luck. This, this will, this will be age, the Super Bowl will have taken place by the time this comes out.

Appreciate the best of luck. I hope it goes well for you. Fuad, thanks so much, man. Thank you. Really, really appreciate it. It was really fun. Okay, appreciate it, very good. Cheers.