My experience

I work on AI adoption, founder programs and support for the center's startup portfolio.

My role

• I designed and delivered an internal technology adoption initiative that introduced six AI tools and trained 100 staff.
• I worked with The Academy to commercialize the initiative for government and corporate clients.
• I designed the strategy for a government collaboration exploring AI technologies for autism.
• I designed and delivered demo days with 30 startup showcases, including a dedicated ElevenLabs showcase, and three hackathons involving 35 teams and more than 100 participants.
• I support a portfolio of 17 startups on operations and follow-on funding.

I co-founded Upstart Bar to work on entrepreneurship, innovation and AI adoption. I lead work with a team of five, across client engagements and the company's own tools.

My role

• I led the creation of five ventures with European clients. Three are operating in the market.
• I trained more than 1,000 employees of a Dubai Government department on the foundations of AI and on using Microsoft 365 Copilot in their daily work, and delivered the same program for 21 employees of a bank in Jordan.
• I worked with a European client to develop and deploy AI agents company-wide, and have deployed several agents in Upstart Bar's own operations.
• I supported more than eight clients on AI adoption strategy, tools and training, including work with executives.
• I designed and delivered five incubation and acceleration programs for corporate and university clients.
• I helped organizations establish innovation departments, including their strategy and technology sandbox initiatives, and I work on Upstart Bar's own strategy.
• I designed intrapreneurship programs in which client employees developed and worked on new ventures and ideas.
• I lead the design of the tools we use in our work, built with AI. Training Control Center is in use; Data Anonymizer has a first phase built, while AI Discovery Agent and Upstart ERP are in development.

Upstart Bar is an accredited CPD provider with The CPD Standards Office (provider 51209). It also holds the CPDSO3023 AI in Training Standard and Provider of Training Excellence (PTE), valid 2026–2027.

I worked on strategy and economic modeling for government clients.

My role

• I supported a Dubai Government entity on several internal and external strategic efforts: department setup and restructuring, digital strategies, and new business models and processes with strategic partners to increase revenue.
• I built economic analysis and models of the UAE economy, trade and future outlook, using quantitative and qualitative data on macroeconomic and microeconomic indicators.
• I carried out economic analysis on affordability, and assessed the economic implications of policy choices.
• I produced market intelligence for investment in new geographies and analysis of geopolitical and sector developments affecting the UAE economy.
• I built dashboards to support economic modeling and data analysis.

I led eight projects for government and corporate clients with a team of three. The portfolio comprised four corporate innovation projects, two UAE entrepreneurship and innovation capacity-building projects, and two research commercialization projects.

My role

• I managed work for clients including Aldar, Ripple, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, Ma'an Authority and Aramco.
• I developed and implemented innovation strategies for corporate clients, and contributed to startAD's internal strategy.
• My Aldar work included Manassah, focused on retail and customer experience, and Scale Up, focused on technology for guest and tenant experience and green asset management.
• I led proposal development that brought in $2.9 million in revenue for startAD.
• I co-created an approach to measuring the impact of commercial projects between clients and startups, and built automated dashboards for project, impact, financial and alumni data.

More about my earlier startAD role

Program Coordinator December 2020–October 2022

• I co-led the planning and delivery of four projects: two focused on UAE capacity building and two on corporate innovation.
• I helped deliver the Conscious Investor Fellowship for GCC investors, focused on social impact and environmental, social and governance considerations.
• I introduced internal processes and a knowledge-sharing initiative to improve how the team worked together.