I · The Operator
Twenty-two years on the exhibition floor and in the conference room — building the rooms where MENA businesses meet European counterparts, and back again.
Trade is a conversation. My work has been to host it — first with logistics and floor plans, now with models and code.
Born into the Levant's commercial culture, I grew up watching contracts close on a handshake and a strong coffee. That literacy — knowing what is said, and what is meant — became the foundation of every exhibition I'd later put on the calendar.
Twenty years architecting B2B exhibitions and trade platforms across MENA — for trade authorities, ministry-backed pavilion programmes, sector federations, and sponsor brands. The brief was usually the same: convene organizers, governments, and capital around projects too large for any one of them, and turn fragmented intent into a working room.
I now spend my mornings building with AI — not as a buzzword, but as a working method. The same instinct that produced exhibitions now produces working agents, retrieval over institutional knowledge, and decision support for the senior teams I've spent my career serving. Pre-product, deliberately small, with two design partners.
Four mandates currently in studio. A short flavour follows; the full atlas is private.
A multi-year regional exhibition program for a MENA trade authority.
A B2B platform connecting European specialty manufacturers to Gulf buyers.
An AI-assisted exhibition operations toolkit, internal pilot.
First essay in draft — on what the senior operator owes the AI shift.