Today I lead AI at Fakeeh Care Group, a listed hospital group in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where I founded its AI Center of Excellence. I know what each setting needs for AI to work in practice — and I still design the systems myself.
PhD in AI, summa cum laude. 27+ publications and 16 patent families in AI and digital health.
Nine years at Philips, from research scientist to director level, moving AI research into the company’s healthcare businesses.
Built Fakeeh’s AI function from the ground up: the strategy, the governance adopted as group policy, and the group’s first in-house AI system in daily production use.
Staff preparing insurance pre-approvals can check the requirements of 19 insurers and get each answer with the exact policy passage behind it. Built in-house on in-Kingdom cloud; the group owns it.
In daily useI wrote the rules for how AI is approved, released and monitored across the group, adopted as group policy, and I hold final validation authority before deployment. Six AI systems were stopped or paused on compliance grounds, including a clinical tool that lacked its required registration.
Adopted as group policyI took a group idea through a venture programme with a sovereign-backed investor and an international venture studio; it was selected as one of the eight companies the programme announced. The AI systems I built in-house belong to the group, not to a vendor.
One of eight selectedI originated Philips Research’s work on conversational AI for behaviour-change coaching. Later I owned a cross-functional programme of about fifteen people across research, engineering and product, with budget responsibility; it handed four AI solutions over to Philips businesses in a single year.
Four handovers in 2022Fast approval where risk is low; firm stops where patients or data are exposed.
Build what differentiates and can be sustained; buy what is commodity; partner where it differentiates but can’t be sustained alone — then test against total cost and lock-in.
Evidence from the real setting before anything is rolled out — a good test score is not readiness.
PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Mannheim, summa cum laude, with the faculty’s Best Doctorate Award; Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. 27+ peer-reviewed publications, 1,200+ citations and six granted US patents.
For conversations about healthcare AI leadership, advisory work and research collaboration.