The Human Advantage: How Gulf Leaders Outsmart AI in the Automation Age

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A conversation with Chris Khouri, who’s spent the last decade watching AI promises collide with Middle Eastern reality. He’s also the kind of person who thinks “digital transformation” should be banned from PowerPoint presentations.
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Maria Marj: AI is clearly everywhere, especially across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Infrastructure, banking, healthcare – it’s reshaping everything. But are we still asking the right questions?

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Chris Khouri: We’re asking completely the wrong bloody questions. Everyone’s obsessed with “What can AI do?” when the only question that matters is “What should we actually let it do?”
Look, AI is embedded in everything now. Power grid predictions in Abu Dhabi, customer complaints at Emirates NBD, maintenance schedules at ADNOC. But here’s what nobody talks about: AI is brilliant at solving problems and absolutely catastrophic at understanding when it’s created new ones.
It doesn’t understand trust. It doesn’t understand nuance. It doesn’t panic in meetings, which sounds good, until you realise that also means it doesn’t know when something’s actually wrong.
It’s like giving a Ferrari to someone who’s never seen a road. Impressive engineering, terrible outcomes.

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Maria Marj: So what’s the real human edge here?

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Chris Khouri: Meaning. Context. The ability to look at a perfectly reasonable AI recommendation and say, “That’s completely mental.”
AI gives you the “what.” Humans give you the “why.” And that’s not some fluffy motivation poster nonsense – that’s the difference between a company that thrives and one that gets automated into irrelevance.
I was in a meeting where an AI system recommended we shut down production during Ramadan because “historical data shows reduced productivity.” Technically correct. Culturally insane. A human looked at that recommendation and said, “Are you trying to start a riot?”
Machines crunch the math. We carry the context. That gap between data and wisdom? That’s where humans still win.

AI does data. We do direction.

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Maria Marj: What are some things machines still can’t get right?

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Chris Khouri: Oh, where do I start? Judgment, for one. AI can spot patterns, generate reports, even finish your sentences – usually with something that sounds like it was written by a committee of consultants having a collective breakdown.
But it cannot evaluate a crisis. It can’t understand office politics. It can’t tell when someone’s lying through their teeth in a board meeting. At ADNOC, AI spots maintenance risks like a champion. But it takes a human engineer to know that shutting down a valve during peak summer means half of Dubai loses air conditioning.

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Maria Marj: What about the existential fears? Will AI become too smart for its own good?

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Chris Khouri: Right, let’s address the elephant in the server room. Everyone’s arguing about whether AI will turn into Skynet and destroy humanity. Elon Musk says we’re doomed. Yann LeCun says calm down, it’s just a very fancy calculator.
Here’s the thing: they’re both wrong and both right, which is about as helpful as a chocolate teapot.
AI today isn’t Skynet. ChatGPT isn’t plotting world domination – it’s mispronouncing Arabic names and writing poetry that sounds like it was created by someone who learned emotions from a Wikipedia article.
But that doesn’t mean we should be complacent. The real risk isn’t evil superintelligence. It’s accidental influence at massive scale. AI quietly nudging decisions, rewriting policies, reshaping workflows without anyone asking, “Wait, why are we doing this?”
Not because it’s sentient, but because we assumed it knew better. That’s where judgment comes in. Human, flawed, culturally-informed judgment. Because someone still needs to say, “No, that’s not right,” even if the graph looks impressive.`
It’s like having a very confident intern who’s wrong about everything but speaks with such authority that everyone just nods along.

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Maria Marj: People are still worried AI will replace them entirely.

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Chris Khouri: It already has – for the mind-numbing stuff. Data entry, basic admin, Level 1 tech support that makes you want to throw your laptop out the window. Good riddance.
But here’s what’s actually happening: AI handles the tedious repetition, which means humans can focus on the interesting problems. It’s like having a very efficient personal assistant who never gets tired, never complains, and never judges you for asking it to redo the same spreadsheet seventeen times.

Let AI handle repetition. Let people handle meaning.

The problem comes when people assume AI is objective. It’s not. It’s just really good at being consistently wrong in ways that look authoritative.
I know a bank that used AI to screen loan applications. Worked brilliantly until they realized it was systematically rejecting applications from certain neighborhoods. The AI wasn’t racist – it was just really good at perpetuating existing biases at superhuman speed.

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Maria Marj: What human skills matter most now?

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Chris Khouri: The ones everyone calls “soft skills,” which is the stupidest term ever invented. There’s nothing soft about empathy when you’re trying to explain to a customer why the AI flagged their transaction as suspicious.
Intuition. Storytelling. The ability to read a room and know when someone’s about to make a spectacularly bad decision. Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi figured this out – they’ve got AI-powered triage, but they also train their staff in empathy because when someone walks in terrified, an algorithm that ranks them as “non-critical” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Emirates NBD rewards user-first service design. ADNOC builds AI-fluent talent who also know how to tell the machine when it’s being an idiot.

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Maria Marj: So AI should be the co-pilot, not the pilot?Chris Khouri: Exactly. AI can read faster than your best analyst and spot patterns you’d miss. But the final call – the stuff that actually matters – still needs human judgment.
I’ve seen AI write emails that are technically perfect and emotionally devastating. “Dear Valued Customer, we regret to inform you that our algorithm has determined you are no longer profitable. Please find attached your termination notice and a dis

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count code for our competitor.”
The best companies aren’t asking how to replace people with AI. They’re asking how to make their people superhuman with AI.

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Maria Marj: Can AI actually be creative?

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… Sure, AI is a remix machine — but remixes can still move people.

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Maria Marj: What happens when it all goes wrong

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Chris Khouri: It already has. Multiple times. Amazon scrapped their hiring AI because it was systematically biased against women. US hospitals saw worse outcomes for Black patients because of flawed algorithms.
Closer to home, I know a Gulf telecom that deployed a customer service bot that couldn’t understand local dialects. Forty percent of their customer base couldn’t get help because the AI kept asking them to “speak more clearly.” The bot wasn’t stupid – it was just trained on data that didn’t include the actual people it was supposed to serve.~
These aren’t edge cases. They’re reminders that AI is a multiplier – if your assumptions are broken, the damage is just faster and harder to fix.

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Maria Marj: What should leaders be doing differently right now?

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Chris Khouri: Here’s what I’ve learned watching companies either thrive or die with AI: the winners aren’t the ones with the best technology. They’re the ones who understand that AI is fundamentally about human choices.Every AI implementation is really a values test. When Emirates NBD’s AI flags a transaction as suspicious, someone has to decide: do we prioritize security or customer experience? When ADNOC’s predictive maintenance suggests shutting down equipment, someone has to weigh profit against safety. The algorithm can’t make those calls because it doesn’t understand what you stand for.

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Maria Marj: That sounds like more than just a tech decision.

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Chris Khouri: Exactly. It’s identity work. Most leaders think they’re buying software, but they’re actually defining who they want to be as an organization.
We spent three months not talking about algorithms. We talked about what success looked like for their people, what diversity meant to them, what they valued beyond just getting work done. Only then did we design the AI system.

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Maria Marj: How do you get people to think that way?

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Chris Khouri: You start with why this matters to them personally. Not the company, not the industry – them.I tell leaders: “In five years, your kids will ask you what you did when AI was reshaping the world. What’s your answer?” That usually cuts through the PowerPoint nonsense pretty quickly.
leaders who get this right understand that AI isn’t an efficiency play – it’s a trust play. Every time your AI makes a decision, it’s either building trust with your people and customers or eroding it. And trust, once lost, is nearly impossible to rebuild.

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Maria Marj: What about the psychological side? People are genuinely anxious about this.

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Chris Khouri: Of course they are. We’re asking people to trust systems they don’t understand, managed by people who often don’t understand them either. It’s like asking someone to get in a car where the driver is blindfolded but insists they know where they’re going.
The anxiety isn’t about the technology. It’s about control. About relevance. About whether they’ll still matter in a world where machines can do more and more of what they do.
Smart leaders address this head-on. They don’t just implement AI – they help their people understand how to stay human in an automated world. They create space for the messy, inefficient, gloriously human stuff that makes work worth doing.

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Maria Marj: So what’s next?

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Chris Khouri: Stop thinking about AI as a tool and start thinking about it as a mirror. It reflects back who you are, what you value, and what you’re willing to stand for.`
The companies that win won’t be the ones with the most advanced AI. They’ll be the ones that use AI to become more human, not less. More empathetic, not less. More connected to their purpose, not more distant from it.`
Focus on what machines can’t do. Not the obvious stuff – we know they can’t feel emotions or understand cultural nuance. The subtle stuff. The ability to know when something’s wrong even when all the data looks right. The instinct to ask “why” instead of just accepting “what.”

Let AI handle the grunt work. You handle the magic.

You can’t out-calculate an algorithm, but you can out-question it, out-context it, out-human it.
The more automated the world becomes, the more valuable the deeply human stuff becomes. Curiosity. Judgment. The ability to look at a perfectly reasonable AI recommendation and say, “That’s mental, and here’s why.”
But here’s the thing – and this is where most leaders get it wrong – you can’t just tell people to “stay human.” You have to create the conditions where being human is valued, rewarded, and essential to success.
So yes, lead the machine. Just don’t let it turn you into a very expensive spreadsheet with legs and a business card.

Maria Marj Marketing and Design Specialist

Chris Khouri Head of Alliances and CX