Engineer by training,
growth and learning leader by craft.

I started my career as a mechanical engineer in the United Arab Emirates, with a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from the American University in Dubai, a graduate programme, and a few years in the workshop. The work was satisfying, but the part I kept gravitating toward wasn’t the engineering. It was the moment a mechanic finally understood why a system behaved the way it did, and the look on their face when the “rule” they’d been following for ten years suddenly made sense. That look pulled me into a different career entirely.

Since then I’ve worked as a thought leader, growth strategist, learning architect, and AI builder inside some of the most demanding organisations in the region. Over the past seven years I’ve led learning and organisational development strategies across automotive, insurance, financial services, energy, and safety-critical industries, first as an in-house technical trainer building automotive curricula across the UAE, then as a consultant designing flagship leadership and sales academies, succession-planning frameworks, and AI-assisted learning ecosystems for Fortune 500 clients across the Gulf, EMEA, and beyond.

The work has always been about the same thing: closing the gap between what a person knows and what they can do under pressure. A management academy. A 95%-satisfaction executive programme. A succession-planning framework backed by performance analytics. An AI-built dashboard that visualises ROI for L&D the way finance teams have always visualised it for everything else. Different surfaces, same underlying craft.

In 2025 I published my first book, How to Speak in Public Without Running for the Exit. It’s a 117-page field guide written from the perspective of an introvert who became a corporate trainer by accident, and it argues that public speaking is identity work disguised as skill work. The technique only takes once you’ve made peace with your own voice. Around the same time I started building. Small tools at first, the kind that solve a Tuesday afternoon problem and never get shipped to anyone else. Then bigger ones: AI agents that actually do useful work in learning and safety operations, learning design pipelines built on the Anthropic API, retrieval systems that respect what a learner is actually trying to do. The builder side and the growth strategist side feed each other. They’re the same job, viewed from two angles.

What I’m thinking about right now

Three things have my attention. First, what AI fluency actually means for knowledge workers, not the marketing version, the version that lets a real person do better work tomorrow than they did yesterday. Second, how to design learning that produces behaviour change without waiting for a perfect business case, coherence under constraint, applied to L&D itself. Third, what a credible interface between human judgement and AI agents looks like in safety-critical work, where the cost of getting it wrong is real.

What I’d love to hear from you about

Anything in the territory above. A framework I’m wrong about. An essay I should have read. A safety leader doing something genuinely new. A book I’d like. An interesting idea you can’t find anyone else to think about with you. The fastest way is the Connect page.