Statement: “The technology is rarely the hard part. The hard part is transformation, changing how an organization actually works so that a tool improves real decisions and outcomes. Reasoned from first principles, artificial intelligence is a powerful means to that end, not an end in itself.” Ali Al Mokdad
Strategic Perspective: Ali Al Mokdad approaches artificial intelligence from first principles, starting from the problem to be solved rather than the tool. He thinks of AI as a stack of layers that build on one another. The first layer is energy. The second is chips. The third is the cloud and compute. The fourth is the AI models. The fifth, and in his view the most important, is the application layer built on top of them, where AI meets a real problem in finance, healthcare, supply chains, public services, and every other field. Value is created or lost at that top layer, in how the technology is actually applied.
He pays particular attention to AI agents, systems that carry out multi-step work rather than answer a single question, because they change how work itself is organized. But his consistent message is that technology is not the problem. Transformation is. An organization can adopt the best models and see little change if its processes, incentives, data, and governance do not change with them. The work of leadership is to redesign how the organization operates so the technology has somewhere to land.
Ali treats responsible use as part of the engineering rather than an afterthought: a clear purpose, sound data, attention to bias and privacy, and human accountability for decisions. He also works to widen access and understanding, so the benefit of these tools is not confined to a small number of organizations.
Future Vision: Ali expects the application layer to be where AI’s real effect is decided, as organizations move from experimenting with tools to redesigning how they work. He sees agents and AI-enabled workflows becoming ordinary parts of operations across finance, healthcare, supply chains, and the public sector. In his view the organizations that benefit most will not be the ones with the most advanced models, but the ones that pair the technology with the harder work of transformation: clear problems, good data, sound governance, and people equipped to use it well.