CASE STUDY
Ultimately, it is about the business problem we are trying to solve with technology. It starts with the strategy, and from there we build the supporting services around it to make sure the business can achieve its revenue and profitability targets, with the technology in place to support them.
It’ s notoriously difficult to move away from heavily customised legacy applications. How far have you progressed in modernising your core technology stack, and what have been the biggest lessons from that journey?
I think it’ s really important that you don’ t put yourself in a box that you can’ t get out of.
You must have heard the horror stories of banks and financial institutions that struggle to change because they’ re still using AS / 400 mainframe systems and similar technologies. They have huge amounts of legacy debt.
What we’ ve tried to do is remain as agile as possible because, to benefit from the latest technology, you need to be on open platforms that enable you to connect different technologies as they emerge.
Moving to the cloud was therefore very important. Why? Because we wanted to ensure that when AI came along and started to mature, we could scale very quickly because we had the data in the right place and the necessary infrastructure to support that growth. The memory, hardware, storage and compute power are all there for us to take advantage of.
You can’ t do that if you’ re building on legacy applications and legacy infrastructure. Getting capital expenditure approved can take months, whereas sometimes you need to act within days.
That’ s why we moved to the cloud. It gives us the agility we need and helps us grow.
Do you have a cloud-first strategy now? How has your cloud architecture evolved?
When I joined, pretty much everything was onpremises. I told the Board that wasn’ t going to cut it because we needed to move to the cloud. Why? Because we needed agility and security. We needed to be able to enable growth faster than we could at the time.
They were hesitant at first, but then they saw that it was necessary. As we were growing, we needed to get things done much faster. Once we had Board approval, we started migrating things to the cloud from day one.
We also started upgrading applications and moving towards standard applications rather than relying on customised, bespoke systems that weren’ t sustainable in the long term. To enable that, we also had to change our business processes.
It’ s not just the technology you need to change; you also need to change internal mindsets and the way people work. That’ s what we did.
AI is also playing an increasingly important role across the Group. How are you using AI internally to improve employee productivity and transform the way people work?
We are investing heavily in AI. AI has been driven by the Board, and we’ re going to a level where we’ re creating our own private AI platform to connect all our data.
As you know, AI is driven by data, and data is the most sensitive part of a business. Today, you have frontier models such as Claude and OpenAI, as well as many other models. But the minute you plug your data into them, you’ re sharing it with the public cloud, which we cannot do. Our data needs to remain secure.
That’ s why we’ re building our own AI platform, which is in-country, sovereign and secure. We’ re plugging in all our data sources to enable our people to use AI agents, helping them become smarter in what they do and how they do it, while making them more productive, efficient and faster.
Are you still in the experimentation phase with AI, or have you already moved into production?
We kicked off our AI strategy a year and a half ago, and we have two tracks. One is focused on use cases where AI is solving real problems within each of our sectors. So, whether it’ s automotive, oil and gas or construction, we are implementing specific AI solutions to help us solve particular business problems.
At the Group level, we’ re looking at an AI platform that connects all our data sources and gives everyone access to agents they can build and use. If those agents can do half of their work and make them faster and smarter, that’ s what we want to enable.
Where do you see the biggest opportunities for AI across automotive, energy, industrial and the Group’ s other businesses? www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO MIDDLE EAST
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