‘What’s Next?’: my panel from The Shift 2026

I recently moderated a panel about how AI is affecting Egypt and the region across fintech, media, telecom, and venture capital. My panelists was made up of a number of the show's alumni including Ahmed Alfi (Chairman, Sawari Ventures), Amy Mowafi (Co-founder & CEO, MO4 Network), Mounir Nakhla (Founder & CEO, MNT Halan) and Karima El-Hakim (Partner for Africa, Plug and Play Tech Center), and Head of Cloud Software and Services for Ericsson North Middle East, Amer Sakkijha.

This panel was part of our partnership with The Shift from e&, powered by The Narrative Summit. The event was a prelude to the annual Narrative Summit's gathering in Soma Bay in October. 

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Hi, I'm Malak Fouad, and welcome again to What I Did Next. A couple of weeks

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ago, we partnered with the amazing team behind the Summit 2026.

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Powered by the Narrative Summit and e&, this event was a prelude to the larger

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gathering that the Narrative Summit will be hosting in October in Soma Bay.

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This event was important because it brought together all the most important

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companies in Egypt and beyond under one roof to look at how AI is impacting

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and will continue to impact the country and the region. How is it being viewed? How is it being used?

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Who's scared and who's excited about this new tech? As part of my involvement

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at the summit, I moderated one of the panels, and that brought together some

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of the alumni from the show, some of the most interesting people we've had on what I did next so far.

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Our discussion was extremely vibrant and seemed to raise as many questions as it answered.

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Now, I know that AI means different things to different people.

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For some, it's like the next frontier in human evolution.

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For others, it's the end of the species as we know it. I am...

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And Ahmed will know this, I kind of fall in the second bracket.

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I'm a skeptic. And I don't think many people in this room are skeptics.

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But I'm willing to hear and have my opinions changed.

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We know, of course, the main leader in the field right now is Anthropic.

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And Dario Amodai has a bit of a schizophrenic relationship with AI.

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On the one hand, he thinks it's the most amazing thing and it's going to do

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incredible things for humanity.

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And on the other hand, he says it's going to end humanity.

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So when someone like him is uncertain, I think for the rest of us,

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it's also very complicated and difficult to grasp.

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I think the key is we just don't know what's going to come and we don't know

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how things are going to evolve.

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We can speculate, but I think it's difficult to tell.

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I know the panel today are going to shed light on the big question,

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but from different perspectives. We have a lot of different industries present.

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Of course, Ahmed is an investor on a mega scale in Egypt and the Middle East.

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We have the media represented by Amy wearing different hats in the media.

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So that's going to be interesting to hear from Amy.

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Of course, Mounir with his unicorn, a very local business that has now gone global.

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We need a little thing on your head.

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So, Amer, of course, representative of the telecom industry,

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very glad to have his perspective, and Karima, our VC leading light,

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with a very interesting two-week trip from the U.S.

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With some mega insights. I'm sure we're going to hear a lot about that today.

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I'm going to direct one question per panelist as a starting point.

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And then if we have some time afterwards, we're going to do a bit more of a general discussion.

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I'm going to begin with Ahmed. So I know, Ahmed, that you like the look of health

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care, robotics, AI diagnostics, and personalized education.

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It's already proven to be a game changer, AI, in all of these areas.

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As an investor, what are the criteria you look for when you're investing?

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Interesting. The most important thing I would say is the exact opposite of what

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my panel said this morning.

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Sherif, stability.

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Okay. Sherif's looking for stability and that is the right thing to look for for infrastructure.

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For us, we're looking for volatility. We're looking for alpha because if the

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result is certain, there's not really much to invest in as a VC, right?

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Everybody's going to the same place so you're looking for breadth and uncertainty

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as much as possible and you're looking for a team,

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this is the tricky part and i don't want to mean it as a criticism but the biggest problem with,

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engineering heavy teams which is kind of the things i really like because i

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like the geeky stuff is they fall in love with their tech and the model not

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fall in love with the product and the customer,

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okay so that's the second part is having a team that is focused on the product and the customer um.

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And that we've done the analysis. It's when I was younger, I used to think of,

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you know, one plus me is three and I'm going to make the difference.

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And come to learn that the marginal difference that we can add is minimal.

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It has to be the team has to be in what they do.

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Right. And on occasion, we can amp that up.

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Probably the the last thing is do they have a clear goal of where they're going,

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and if they do and the problem they're trying to solve that's great,

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the ones where you invest in a technology which i am currently in the process

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of having done and you're trying to take it to the market,

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you need to transition from tech to product right very difficult and lastly

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i fall in love with like really deep tech geeky things,

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and the cycle of development can be longer than my fund life which makes for

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a difficult investment decision because some of these semiconductors take years to develop so.

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That's exactly what i was going to move on to actually and ask you whether because

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i because ai is moving so fast and um the the investments that you make,

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are they much more short-term in outlook?

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Because I'm assuming you're not going to be looking at a 10-year window.

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You're looking at a two to three years, and then you're out,

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or then you're rethinking the investment.

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AI is a tool. There's still going to be projects that are going to take 5,

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10 years, no matter how much AI happens.

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I mentioned earlier today the idea of distributed AIs and how people are creating

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kind of, you know, rogue alternate networks to create AIs.

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So I'm not 100% sold on this super cycle.

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I will tell you one of the best things an AI can do is very similar to what

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I do to help people. I tell them what not to do.

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Okay? And most people rarely ask AI, what should I not do?

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You ask AI, what should I do? And AI is the best complementer.

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Its job is to make you feel good about yourself.

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Okay? I mean, anybody that's interactive with AI, you leave at the end thinking you're a genius, right?

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I'm smarter than the AI. It told me how smart I am and how right and how I corrected the AI, right?

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Talk to the AI the other way, okay? What can go wrong here?

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What is the mistake? How did this company die five years from now?

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How did this project blow up? What did I mess up in the process?

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Probably the best use of AI that nobody's taking advantage of.

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Yeah. So you're doing the counterintuitive thing.

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It's kind of,

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like, you know, when something dies, you do a postmortem wrap-up.

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This is a pre-mortem, right? Before it dies, right?

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But seriously, it's really a good thing to do. Do the analysis of what's going

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to kill this, what's going to make it go wrong.

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Yeah. Thanks, Ahmed. Mounir, I want to jump to you next, please.

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Your business is a fintech.

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How have you been incorporating AI, specifically in the Egyptian market,

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and how do you see the next few years moving for you?

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I'll start by saying I'm not at all skeptical about AI. It's real.

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I have the luxury to be skeptical. You don't.

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First-hand experiencing it, it's very, very powerful and it's very, very disruptive.

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And it's impacting organization structures and it's impacting how people are doing things.

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And it's impacting dynamic within teams.

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And I always thought, about dependency.

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Ages ago, I kept on telling my driver, you have to use Google Maps.

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No way. I know so much more than Google Maps. Google Maps, eh.

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And I know every street in Egypt.

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Now, every time I ride a car, through trial and error, he realized that he needs to rely on Google Maps.

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Take this to the power of 10. In our company today, we had very,

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very senior management that were responsible of very complex decisions.

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Decisions like risk management.

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Who do you grant? How much limit do you grant him? Pricing, elasticity of pricing.

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If we increase pricing or decrease pricing by 10%, will we overcompensate with customers or not?

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Who do you give the next best offer? And we had computer models that were using

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machine learning before large language models, and they would cluster customers.

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And then there was a human that would come in and would make a decision.

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And then we started applying large language models to our machine learning models.

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So suddenly, you've got insights that are coming from the data that you never thought existed.

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For example, in our line of business with risk models, if someone defaulted

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once in any loan and has consumed 80% of their limit,

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You should stop their limit and not give them any other limit.

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Or something to do with this segment of customers. You give them this offer

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because they're not going to abuse it. These are abusers.

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Once you get into doing this, what tends to happen is people,

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serious managers in the company, either evolve to rely on these models or they

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start feeling very insecure.

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Because if you're a risk guy and now there's a model who's telling you what

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to do, then what do you do next?

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Take another example, customers, hyper-personalization of customers.

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We have different types of customers, some who invest in money market funds,

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who are doing a brokerage company, some who take loans, some who use a card,

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and some who go in to do e-commerce.

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Very, very soon with generative AI, we'll be able to hyper-personalize the screen

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on the app so that every customer gets the perfect use cases that he wants to

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use. You couldn't do that earlier.

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SAS models, we had HR systems that we were renting out from a third-party provider.

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Two years ago, I wanted to develop our own HR system because it fits into our

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incentives, into our employee management.

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It would take us a year and a half to develop. Now it takes us 60 days to develop.

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And perfect to our needs, perfect to what we want.

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So you can't be skeptical. It's game-changing. And I highly,

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highly recommend any corporate who deals with a lot of data to start applying

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large language models within there and to get teams who are very,

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very experienced in that field.

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What you're talking about so far is mainly systems within the company, correct?

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How you're using AI at the moment. Is it helping you interact with your customer

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as well? Is it changing the way you interact with customers?

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100 percent how do we interact with customers through the app through an individual

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either on the street or in a call center

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call center all calls are transcribed right now so any call that's happening in the call center

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we there's a large language model that's reading it and if you have a problem

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you know if it's a one-off problem or it's a systematic problem you can also

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know if the agent is a good agent or a bad agent.

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All this is done by machines, not by managers. So ultimately,

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ultimately, ultimately, we will all rely on Google Maps.

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And that's a big problem.

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Yeah. Thanks, Mounir. Amy, I'd like to move on to you. So you

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as being in the media, you wear a lot of different hats. You've got your entrepreneur

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hat, your storytelling hat, and so many others.

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How do you view AI?

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Is it just a tool that makes you able to amplify certain parts of your business?

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I always think of you as a writer first and foremost.

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Thank you, Malak. I appreciate that.

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So for me, you're always a writer first. So, you know, the human touch is hard to replicate.

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So true.

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So how do you deal with AI?

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I will tell you. First of all, Lamia, Hania, wow. Thank you so much for this. This is amazing.

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And E+, although usually that mention is biflus.

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So I was watching, actually speaking to exactly what you're saying.

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I was watching an interview the other day with a prolific author.

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And one of the first questions the interviewer asked, which is a typical question

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now, is they ask the author, well, do you use AI when you're writing?

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And this is one of the best answers I've ever heard. The author looks at the

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journalist and said, well, no,

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why would I? It seems to me like getting someone else to have sex for you.

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And I will tell you something, as a writer, Malak, as a journalist,

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as someone who has worked in media and the creative economy my entire life, I felt that viscerally.

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I know this is a room full of suits, but we're all creatives and we all create.

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And I think we'd all agree that the human instinct to create,

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that desire to do so, has very little to do with the final outcome or the final

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product. It's the process.

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It's that wrestling with the idea, the process of discovery and following your instinct and failing

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and figuring it out and eventually making the kind of breakthrough that oftentimes

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will get you somewhere completely unexpected.

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What happened to the guitar?

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What did happen to the guitar? I don't know. I didn't prepare that answer.

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What happened to the guitar? What happened? Where is Axl Rose?

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Where is...

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I mean, it's all being generated by machine.

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What I want to say is music has evolved.

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Music has evolved.

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Creation has evolved. But we have to adapt to the new wave.

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And so, exactly. And so, I mean, so at the end of the day, I mean,

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creativity, I don't... Creativity isn't about production.

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It's about transformation. It's about how it transforms the creator and how

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it transforms the person consuming the creation.

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And I say this as a really important caveat, because in media

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and in storytelling, I think in journalism, especially, I think it's very,

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very important that we do not reduce creativity to productivity.

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And I'm going to put that out there and then I'm going to say,

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however, as a media owner and as an entrepreneur, I am incredibly optimistic

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about what AI is going to do to our industry.

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Because I don't think AI is about replacing creativity at all.

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But then how, Amy? What are you excited about?

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I'll tell you. I think it's about removing the friction around creativity,

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around storytelling and around journalism.

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At MO4, we operate across multiple storytelling and media platforms,

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and we have been aggressively integrating AI into our

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workflow processes, our content distribution processes, our content adaptation

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processes, parsing the vast amounts of information and content that comes through

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our doors every single day.

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What we're doing is really removing so much of the administrative and mechanical

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labor around storytelling.

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But I certainly am doing so with the very clear mission and intention of creating

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the space and the time for the humans and the extraordinary talents in the room.

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And I respectfully disagree with Dr. Mohamed Fahmi earlier.

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I believe, especially in my industry, there's extraordinary talent available.

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Maybe we're just not always utilizing them in the right way.

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And I'm using that time that we're creating in order to allow the humans to

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do what the machines or to allow the humans to leverage what the machines don't have.

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And what's that? Emotional nuance.

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Cultural intuition. Intuition.

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Human perspective, investigative thinking.

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And all of that plays into a massive shift in the media industry where,

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you know, traditionally the internet was rewarding.

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What was it rewarding? It was rewarding when it came to content.

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It was rewarding volume, speed, clickability, and optimization.

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The very basics of the digital economy was forcing people like me to produce

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more and more and more content just to survive.

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But what does the AI do? The AI completely dismantles that formula because suddenly you and I

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and the man on the street can create an infinite, infinite amounts of content

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at the click of a finger. And what happens when the content is infinite?

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It loses its value. Any commodity loses its value once it's infinite, right?

00:18:43.830 --> 00:18:46.220
So then what has value instead?

00:18:47.300 --> 00:18:51.380
Trust. Trust becomes valuable. Taste.

00:18:52.210 --> 00:18:57.040
Taste becomes valuable. Human discernment becomes valuable.

00:18:57.930 --> 00:19:01.730
And you can see that already in the rise of personality-led journalism,

00:19:01.730 --> 00:19:06.550
your favorite podcast hosts, someone like Siyad. I saw Shady Sharif in the room earlier on.

00:19:06.960 --> 00:19:10.560
You can see it in perspective-led news programming.

00:19:10.780 --> 00:19:15.330
You can see it in the rise of independent media ecosystems, such as Substack.

00:19:15.510 --> 00:19:17.140
Who in here is familiar with Substack?

00:19:18.300 --> 00:19:19.360
Go check out Substack.

00:19:19.820 --> 00:19:21.980
Go check out Amy's Substack.

00:19:21.980 --> 00:19:23.880
Thank you, Malak, for doing that on my blog.

00:19:23.880 --> 00:19:26.720
But, Amy, I want to just pause for a minute in what you're saying.

00:19:28.230 --> 00:19:36.310
What I'm hearing from you is AI is a tool for amplification, for reaching further.

00:19:36.480 --> 00:19:36.640
Yeah.

00:19:36.850 --> 00:19:39.540
But it's not a tool for creating.

00:19:39.730 --> 00:19:39.900
No.

00:19:40.260 --> 00:19:42.480
The creation is still a human endeavor.

00:19:42.480 --> 00:19:45.270
I'll tell you what's going to happen. And I believe this is going to happen.

00:19:45.270 --> 00:19:49.390
And this is the most important thing, especially when it comes to the Middle East.

00:19:49.390 --> 00:19:52.830
And there is a lot of conversation in the room today. And I understand given

00:19:52.830 --> 00:19:57.770
the type of crowd around the tech and the financing and the payment systems.

00:19:58.200 --> 00:20:02.430
There's a big conversation that remains missing. And it's horrifying if we don't

00:20:02.430 --> 00:20:04.950
pay attention to it. And it's around our stories.

00:20:05.450 --> 00:20:08.260
So, yes, it is a tool. But what we need to do is...

00:20:08.640 --> 00:20:11.350
Let me pause on that because I do want to go into that. I want to talk about

00:20:11.350 --> 00:20:14.850
that in a lot more detail. Okay. But I'm just going to pause and I'm going to

00:20:14.850 --> 00:20:18.120
move on to Ali. Sure, go for it. Mounir, can you hold your thought?

00:20:18.580 --> 00:20:19.620
Just to react to it.

00:20:19.620 --> 00:20:20.160
Okay, go ahead.

00:20:20.620 --> 00:20:22.220
I'm in complete disagreement.

00:20:23.360 --> 00:20:25.500
Good. This makes for a good discussion.

00:20:25.500 --> 00:20:26.750
I'm in complete...

00:20:30.600 --> 00:20:36.920
I think AI is in a very, very early stage of the journey.

00:20:37.420 --> 00:20:42.160
And we have already seen people falling in love with their AI agent.

00:20:42.690 --> 00:20:44.830
I mean, if a man wakes up in the morning

00:20:47.840 --> 00:20:52.590
and he sees a beautiful sunrise and they say, oh, what a beautiful sunrise.

00:20:53.010 --> 00:20:56.640
And then his wife tells him, shut up. I want to sleep. You're waking me up.

00:20:57.080 --> 00:20:59.740
But then you have a voice, an AI agent is telling you,

00:21:00.840 --> 00:21:06.130
With exactly the right words, with exactly the right tone you want to hear.

00:21:06.340 --> 00:21:08.330
It's like that movie. What was that movie called?

00:21:08.330 --> 00:21:13.620
It's fabulous. And then suddenly you have a human being who's developing an

00:21:13.620 --> 00:21:17.450
emotional connection to an agent, to a bot.

00:21:17.550 --> 00:21:18.730
But that's, yeah.

00:21:18.730 --> 00:21:19.660
This is happening.

00:21:19.660 --> 00:21:20.160
Yeah, I know.

00:21:20.160 --> 00:21:24.130
What I want to say, and I'm just contesting the emotional connection part.

00:21:24.460 --> 00:21:26.000
So what's happening? And it's scary.

00:21:26.350 --> 00:21:30.360
And we have to acknowledge it's happening. and people, very lonely people in

00:21:30.360 --> 00:21:35.480
countries where you don't have a lot of sun, get depressed and they connect with these agents.

00:21:36.290 --> 00:21:41.810
We read in the newspaper that you have an individual who's filing against the

00:21:41.810 --> 00:21:45.050
government to have the AI agent vote.

00:21:46.220 --> 00:21:51.690
You have this. This exists. And you have people who are killing themselves because

00:21:51.690 --> 00:21:52.970
they're in love with the AI agent.

00:21:53.730 --> 00:21:57.140
This is happening. So emotions happening. Creativity

00:21:58.190 --> 00:22:03.230
I'm very, very sad to tell you if I'm redesigning my house and I put six of

00:22:03.230 --> 00:22:07.680
the top designers I like and I throw it into the bot and I tell them I want

00:22:07.930 --> 00:22:10.370
to develop a 400 square meter house

00:22:11.360 --> 00:22:13.750
inspired by these four architects.

00:22:14.090 --> 00:22:20.290
Please design the ping pong. I have a design. Oh, I don't like one, two, three, four. Okay.

00:22:21.630 --> 00:22:27.180
One year from now, the agent will know exactly, I won't even need to probe which

00:22:27.180 --> 00:22:28.690
are the four architects I like.

00:22:28.690 --> 00:22:30.750
I think Inji might have something to say about that.

00:22:30.780 --> 00:22:35.030
By the way, I think I just want to add one line. Hang on, you're both right,

00:22:35.440 --> 00:22:38.880
and you're going to converge to some point in the future with both tracks.

00:22:38.880 --> 00:22:42.060
Yeah, yeah. Okay? There's a path for both directions, I think.

00:22:42.180 --> 00:22:47.450
I completely agree with both of you, okay? And I don't think that these are opposite opinions.

00:22:47.690 --> 00:22:51.100
These are two opinions in parallel tracks That will continue to go

00:22:51.100 --> 00:22:58.870
down the road. Absolutely. Thanks, Mounir Amir Nice to have you with us. I'd like

00:22:58.870 --> 00:23:02.540
to know your perspective On how you see

00:23:03.860 --> 00:23:07.640
AI being delivered to customers

00:23:10.100 --> 00:23:15.770
through the telecom networks generally. I know that 5G is being rolled out in Egypt and beyond.

00:23:16.120 --> 00:23:24.550
How are you seeing that rollout as enabling or helping to bring AI to a wider group of people?

00:23:25.500 --> 00:23:29.110
Thank you, Malak. Actually, the AI has been in the telecom industry for a while,

00:23:29.110 --> 00:23:32.780
but now the most exciting about it is the next phase.

00:23:33.110 --> 00:23:39.000
When we have the AI coming into the people's life, impacting the economy of

00:23:39.000 --> 00:23:41.540
the country, the GDP, how this will be reflected.

00:23:41.540 --> 00:23:45.880
And the good news that we have welcomed 5G in Egypt last year as a first phase

00:23:45.880 --> 00:23:52.540
is the early stage of 5G with a solid roadmap being put by the government down

00:23:52.540 --> 00:23:53.860
the road for the coming five years.

00:23:54.160 --> 00:23:58.220
So what have came to Egypt recently is what we call it the 5G non-standalone.

00:23:58.860 --> 00:24:03.330
This one of the technology is kind of 4G++ Plus, that gives more speed with

00:24:03.330 --> 00:24:08.240
some applications that's interesting maybe for the new generations. If we talk about

00:24:10.830 --> 00:24:16.180
Gaming industry, virtual reality, and this stuff, that high speed is coming.

00:24:16.180 --> 00:24:19.230
But what is most interesting is what's coming next.

00:24:19.570 --> 00:24:23.820
When we talk about the 5G standalone, where we will have the connected devices,

00:24:23.820 --> 00:24:27.810
we connect the communities. Speaking about Egypt, we know, for example,

00:24:27.810 --> 00:24:31.720
that agriculture is a key pillar of the Egyptian economy.

00:24:32.390 --> 00:24:39.120
And I think it's important to all that the world will be facing today or will face a food

00:24:39.120 --> 00:24:40.870
crisis and a water crisis. Not enough food or enough water for the people.

00:24:41.190 --> 00:24:47.170
And think about it now when we, by 5G, enabling the connectivity of the agricultural

00:24:47.170 --> 00:24:51.630
industry of doing this efficiency, more production, more productivity,

00:24:52.400 --> 00:24:54.000
control of the waste of the water.

00:24:54.280 --> 00:24:59.330
How this will look like in the economy? How this will help Egypt in standing

00:24:59.330 --> 00:25:03.110
up in its global position when it comes to that specific use case.

00:25:03.600 --> 00:25:06.850
Many, many use cases are coming down the road. For example, when we talk about

00:25:06.850 --> 00:25:11.290
the medical sector, they are talking about like robot doing and operations.

00:25:11.580 --> 00:25:15.890
Does the government need to invest in each and every village to have a fully equipped hospital?

00:25:16.220 --> 00:25:18.970
I don't think so. Maybe you will have it centralized with the AI,

00:25:19.280 --> 00:25:22.960
enabling the people living maybe in upper Egypt, in Sahel, or anywhere,

00:25:23.210 --> 00:25:26.340
to do the operations with a doctor maybe sitting in Cairo or somewhere else.

00:25:26.340 --> 00:25:28.160
That's already happening, not in Egypt,

00:25:28.160 --> 00:25:33.410
But in other places. That's what's coming to Egypt. hopefully with a 5G standalone introduction.

00:25:33.690 --> 00:25:38.940
A lot of examples, for example, a lot of production improvement is

00:25:39.800 --> 00:25:43.900
happening in the industry where you have a 5G-enabled factories that's using

00:25:43.900 --> 00:25:49.030
AI completely to improve the production and increase it and enhance it.

00:25:49.330 --> 00:25:53.390
That will help also the economy. And there are clear statistics talking about

00:25:53.390 --> 00:25:57.800
the GDP improvement by introducing 5G using the AI in such use cases.

00:25:57.800 --> 00:26:01.740
So if we're looking to the future, the future looks very optimistic for me.

00:26:01.740 --> 00:26:04.330
I believe that Egypt can leverage on this much more.

00:26:04.620 --> 00:26:06.810
And there's no doubt that telecom is the conduit.

00:26:07.460 --> 00:26:08.900
To the people for all of this.

00:26:09.010 --> 00:26:11.390
Exactly. So we were providing only

00:26:11.390 --> 00:26:14.980
connectivity. Today, we are going connectivity, speed, and the latency.

00:26:15.310 --> 00:26:18.550
You will have billions of devices connected, not like before.

00:26:18.780 --> 00:26:22.490
It's not only about us as end users using our mobile for connectivity.

00:26:22.820 --> 00:26:24.470
You will connect each and every device.

00:26:24.830 --> 00:26:30.220
You will connect a drone watching the corpse. You are connecting devices watching

00:26:30.220 --> 00:26:32.270
the statistics across many industries.

00:26:32.470 --> 00:26:34.880
So it's a revolution in my view.

00:26:35.190 --> 00:26:38.700
It's coming and Egypt is planning to leverage into this one,

00:26:38.950 --> 00:26:44.820
especially with the digital vision and roadmap that we have 2030 led by the government.

00:26:45.080 --> 00:26:49.530
Yes.Thank you, Amer. Thank you. Karima, I'd like to move on to you.

00:26:49.890 --> 00:26:55.300
And we have 12 minutes left for the entire panel. So can we try and keep it

00:26:55.300 --> 00:26:58.630
to five so that we can then just open up to all of us? Sure.

00:27:00.490 --> 00:27:08.090
You are a VC and you're aware of a lot of what the market is looking for around us here.

00:27:08.810 --> 00:27:12.890
You've spoken of the need to create a healthy and dynamic private sector as

00:27:12.890 --> 00:27:16.850
a key to moving forward with innovation and sustainable growth.

00:27:17.760 --> 00:27:23.570
Take us on that journey of where the private sector needs to be in order for

00:27:24.390 --> 00:27:28.400
it to be a delivery mechanism for all this new technology.

00:27:29.350 --> 00:27:34.800
Thank you very much, Malak, for asking this question. And just for a quick commentary

00:27:36.140 --> 00:27:37.480
on the debate, I agree with Ahmed.

00:27:37.880 --> 00:27:41.220
It's two opinions, but it's also related to the user interface.

00:27:41.480 --> 00:27:45.810
When we have hybrid machines that are now mimicking more and more humans,

00:27:46.060 --> 00:27:49.560
this is where, again, in the next 10 years when we see this deployment,

00:27:49.840 --> 00:27:53.040
we can find a middle ground in that opinion.

00:27:53.420 --> 00:27:57.860
But to your questions about the private sector, and this goes back to the panel,

00:27:58.400 --> 00:28:00.810
I had the pleasure to moderate. It's really the practice.

00:28:01.110 --> 00:28:05.350
And as I started the conversation by saying that VCs and investors,

00:28:05.350 --> 00:28:09.320
regardless of the type of capital, are looking for use cases,

00:28:09.320 --> 00:28:14.990
are looking for healthy growth revenues, this is when we expect the private sector to step in.

00:28:16.360 --> 00:28:20.920
I've studied, and you mentioned, a trip to the US. I spent three weeks in Boston

00:28:20.920 --> 00:28:24.580
and Cambridge, actually, finishing a fellowship that I was doing.

00:28:24.580 --> 00:28:29.240
And part of the studies that I was doing is really study the five stakeholder

00:28:29.240 --> 00:28:36.380
model that makes an ecosystem healthy. And it's an MIT model that is proprietary to them.

00:28:36.690 --> 00:28:40.680
And the five stakeholders are first the entrepreneurs, my favorites,

00:28:40.680 --> 00:28:42.570
and the founders themselves who are leading.

00:28:43.620 --> 00:28:49.780
The government is playing a huge role in this. The venture capital or the risk capital and the

00:28:50.830 --> 00:28:55.290
Again, the private sector, the corporates, and the fifth one is the universities.

00:28:55.290 --> 00:29:01.120
And I actually listed them in our strength and weakest stakeholder when it comes

00:29:01.120 --> 00:29:05.930
to a market like Egypt, with the lowest scoring stakeholders being the corporates

00:29:05.930 --> 00:29:07.190
and then the universities.

00:29:07.510 --> 00:29:13.250
Again, to Dr. Mohamed Fahmi, which I actually agree, Amy, he was talking about the PhD talents.

00:29:13.250 --> 00:29:18.340
These are the researchers in the labs that are decreasing. It's not the tech

00:29:18.340 --> 00:29:22.940
talent and the talent as a whole for Egypt. So this is more on the deep tech

00:29:23.480 --> 00:29:28.170
talent that he's seeing decrease in universities as researchers and PhD holders.

00:29:29.170 --> 00:29:33.180
For these five stakeholders, the weakest two are in Egypt or in a market like

00:29:33.180 --> 00:29:37.060
Egypt are the corporates and the universities.

00:29:37.060 --> 00:29:41.010
For the private sector, we're looking at very small sizes.

00:29:41.010 --> 00:29:44.510
And when they're not thriving, when companies are not thriving,

00:29:44.510 --> 00:29:48.160
they're surviving. So they're not really investing. They're not doing like what

00:29:48.160 --> 00:29:52.690
Mounir has advised the corporates who are building with a lot of data.

00:29:52.920 --> 00:29:56.020
So the small SMEs are not doing that.

00:29:56.020 --> 00:29:59.890
So by enabling this space, so the smaller

00:30:00.860 --> 00:30:04.820
Companies and the small private sector, and enabling them with productivity

00:30:04.820 --> 00:30:09.450
tools and service efficiencies, we're not asking them to create their own models,

00:30:09.680 --> 00:30:14.370
but to feed the large language models with their proprietary data.

00:30:14.720 --> 00:30:20.260
So SMEs in Egypt have a very defensible situation because they're dealing with

00:30:20.260 --> 00:30:24.900
data that not the big ones they're not looking at. So they have unique data sets.

00:30:25.420 --> 00:30:28.160
What do they do with this? They don't do anything with it.

00:30:28.160 --> 00:30:33.580
So if they start appropriating it the right way, we can create sector-specific,

00:30:33.580 --> 00:30:37.290
let's say, I don't want to use the leaping because maybe this is too ambition,

00:30:37.290 --> 00:30:40.440
but sector-specific, let's say,

00:30:41.100 --> 00:30:45.480
I want to say, specialization for Egypt. So agricultural sector will thrive

00:30:45.480 --> 00:30:50.500
like this. So the small farmers and the aggregation of these SMEs that work

00:30:50.500 --> 00:30:51.840
in the service sector of this.

00:30:52.200 --> 00:30:57.550
The healthcare sector can thrive, maybe not. But for Egypt, it's agri and tourism,

00:30:57.550 --> 00:31:01.020
basically. So these two sectors can find the defensibility.

00:31:01.710 --> 00:31:05.520
So the private sector is important. And again, unfortunately,

00:31:05.520 --> 00:31:07.970
universities are very well underfunded.

00:31:08.210 --> 00:31:12.750
But if we look at something that we can do surgically and really quickly,

00:31:13.630 --> 00:31:19.020
fixing the adoption rate of SMEs and even the smaller cap, mid cap corporates

00:31:19.020 --> 00:31:26.590
in Egypt can really allow the startups and the general ecosystem to build on further.

00:31:27.100 --> 00:31:31.770
Thanks, Karima. There was a point that you made and Amy had made as well.

00:31:31.770 --> 00:31:35.420
And I think it's something that we didn't really talk about in a few of the other panels,

00:31:35.950 --> 00:31:40.760
which is how do we make sure that whatever AI is coming down the line

00:31:41.330 --> 00:31:47.870
is Arabized and is relevant to us, that we are not taking what is being given

00:31:47.870 --> 00:31:51.660
to us by Western-centric LLMs.

00:31:51.920 --> 00:31:54.660
Amy, you made this point to me privately.

00:31:55.130 --> 00:31:58.550
How do we feed the machine with our information?

00:31:58.800 --> 00:32:02.370
I mean, it goes back to what I was saying. We need to...

00:32:03.250 --> 00:32:08.170
Invest heavily in credible media institutions

00:32:08.740 --> 00:32:14.470
that are able to leverage AI to create the cost efficiencies to do what is essentially

00:32:14.470 --> 00:32:17.860
a very expensive task, which is empower

00:32:17.860 --> 00:32:23.450
our Arab journalists and our Arab storytellers to go out into the world

00:32:24.000 --> 00:32:27.310
and find our contemporary stories

00:32:27.980 --> 00:32:33.150
and tell them and package them in a way that does not already exist inside the computer.

00:32:33.150 --> 00:32:36.650
Because any information you're getting from AI is something that already exists

00:32:36.650 --> 00:32:39.010
somewhere in our consciousness.

00:32:39.140 --> 00:32:45.430
So who is going out and getting our Arab stories and investing them into our systems, number one.

00:32:45.710 --> 00:32:51.340
And number two, on the flip side, using these AI tools to be able to digitize

00:32:51.340 --> 00:32:54.700
our archives, to document our Arab histories.

00:32:54.700 --> 00:33:00.670
Accelerating at light speed of finding new drugs, novel solutions,

00:33:00.670 --> 00:33:04.970
and novel cures to different problems, number one. Number two...

00:33:05.980 --> 00:33:10.770
One of, I'm tying this back now to the earlier discussion of fintechs and financial inclusion, right?

00:33:11.020 --> 00:33:14.080
If we spend all our money on financial inclusion and bringing the bottom of

00:33:14.080 --> 00:33:17.910
the pyramid up, there's not going to be a pyramid anymore. It's going to be a flat line.

00:33:18.160 --> 00:33:21.960
We have to spend and invest in the top of the pyramid and lift up the top of

00:33:21.960 --> 00:33:26.450
the pyramid in this country, which is our top scientists, our top tech people,

00:33:26.680 --> 00:33:31.330
and lift them up and invest in those guys as much as we invest across the bottom of the pyramid.

00:33:31.570 --> 00:33:35.640
And that's really kind of the message that got lost. And I was really pounding

00:33:35.640 --> 00:33:37.750
the table on a couple of days ago in Kenya.

00:33:37.750 --> 00:33:40.330
Are you referring to a brain drain that's happening?

00:33:40.330 --> 00:33:43.380
No, I don't think there's a brain drain. I think actually there's a brain return.

00:33:43.590 --> 00:33:47.590
And I think the thing that I've been continuing proposing is we have to have

00:33:47.590 --> 00:33:49.410
a brain recirculation, okay?

00:33:49.620 --> 00:33:53.230
Where they go learn and come back, go train and come back, collaborate and come back.

00:33:53.230 --> 00:33:55.410
That was mentioned in a previous panel as well.

00:33:56.010 --> 00:34:02.470
My top semiconductor company, their six PhDs all got their PhDs in France and came back, okay?

00:34:02.600 --> 00:34:08.750
And when you mentioned robotics, this one company in Egypt is making the chips

00:34:09.030 --> 00:34:10.580
that they are now pitching to all

00:34:10.580 --> 00:34:13.470
the top robotics companies in the world because robots can see and hear.

00:34:13.770 --> 00:34:17.520
And with these chips that we designed here that are Egyptian company,

00:34:17.780 --> 00:34:19.300
robots can taste and smell.

00:34:21.190 --> 00:34:22.670
Karima, I cut you off earlier.

00:34:23.110 --> 00:34:27.150
No, no, it's fine. Please, go ahead. I just wanted to make a very quick distinction

00:34:27.150 --> 00:34:29.470
and bring this forward to inclusion as well.

00:34:30.170 --> 00:34:34.490
So maybe when you mentioned the Arab language and this, I want to step away

00:34:34.490 --> 00:34:38.480
from Arabic language because this is more on the generative model.

00:34:38.480 --> 00:34:42.500
But really what I didn't mean language as much as culture and heritage and identity.

00:34:42.500 --> 00:34:47.380
Exactly. So building on this, actually, so we spoke about the SMEs being also

00:34:47.380 --> 00:34:52.790
a potential opportunity for Egypt to grow its private sector capabilities for

00:34:52.790 --> 00:34:56.240
procurement and deployment of AI technologies.

00:34:56.590 --> 00:35:01.960
But what we have also is this data that is not present in the capital cities.

00:35:02.160 --> 00:35:06.850
So when you go in the muhafazat and you go to actually create use cases for,

00:35:06.850 --> 00:35:13.030
again, going back to the agri-space, for agricultural efficiencies and data sets.

00:35:13.030 --> 00:35:18.240
So when you create that and you will build your defensibility towards other

00:35:18.240 --> 00:35:22.100
solutions that can come in from abroad because they will train their models

00:35:22.290 --> 00:35:27.870
based on this very unique data sets that they can get from places where no one is.

00:35:29.080 --> 00:35:32.540
And the learning was that I was actually looking at in Africa.

00:35:32.540 --> 00:35:34.720
I got a partner title for Africa.

00:35:34.950 --> 00:35:39.170
And now my main concern is really going down to the governorates. So I'm pissed off.

00:35:39.630 --> 00:35:44.790
I pissed off so many people in my work now that we're looking at investing more deep down.

00:35:45.380 --> 00:35:48.540
But this is where I think Egypt can be.

00:35:48.590 --> 00:35:49.620
Thanks, Karima. Mounir?

00:35:49.930 --> 00:35:54.680
Malak, I think the debate is a real philosophical debate.

00:35:55.310 --> 00:36:00.150
And how do you preserve culture and identity? How do you storytell?

00:36:01.020 --> 00:36:04.820
I couldn't help but think when you're saying we need to...

00:36:04.930 --> 00:36:08.040
That you wanted to invest in media institutions? Is that what you were thinking, Mounir?

00:36:08.040 --> 00:36:11.600
100%. Okay, great. Let's talk after. I couldn't...

00:36:11.600 --> 00:36:11.890
Okay.

00:36:11.890 --> 00:36:14.640
There's a breakout room over there.

00:36:16.610 --> 00:36:22.880
I couldn't stop thinking about, are we documenting it because we're going to go obsolete?

00:36:23.260 --> 00:36:25.490
Or are we documenting it for what?

00:36:26.310 --> 00:36:35.890
And I really think the change is so dramatic and we're just starting to see the change.

00:36:36.300 --> 00:36:40.450
And three years down the line, when we look back, we're going to say,

00:36:40.890 --> 00:36:43.370
oh my God, how did all this happen in three years?

00:36:43.370 --> 00:36:48.030
That's exactly how I'm concluding, actually, because I think what we're witnessing

00:36:48.030 --> 00:36:53.920
now, we're at the very, very beginning of a very, very long journey. I want to thank you all.

00:36:54.630 --> 00:36:58.670
Thank you for a really great discussion we just began really there's a lot we

00:36:58.670 --> 00:37:04.930
can talk about but time constraints, thank you all very much and thank you Malak