What Commitment Actually Looks Like

Commitment is not measured by what you announce. It is measured by what you stay to build.

Since UNGA, I’ve been across the region – sitting in rooms with ministers, CEOs, educators, engineers. Every conversation is different, but there’s a version of the same question underneath all of them: who’s actually going to be here for this?

Not here for the ribbon-cutting. Here for the decades after it.

I think about this a lot, because the honest answer to that question is harder than it sounds. Showing up for the long run means being present before you have all the answers. It means being in conversations where the brief is still being written, where the outcome isn’t guaranteed, where your value isn’t a product feature – it’s judgment, proximity, and the willingness to stay in the room when things get complicated. Most partnerships aren’t built for that. They’re built for the moment of announcement, and then they move on.

The UAE has shown me what the alternative looks like.

The country isn’t experimenting with AI anymore – it’s embedding it into the fabric of how it runs. Into how students learn, how citizens access government services, how strategically critical industries transform. That’s not a pilot. That’s a structural shift, and it requires partners willing to get into the detail with you.

Take education. What we’re doing with schools and universities isn’t about putting software in classrooms. It’s about making sure the next generation has genuine fluency with the tools that will define their working lives. That’s a long bet. It doesn’t show up in a quarterly number. But it’s the kind of bet that matters.

Or TAMM – our partnership to power digital government services in Abu Dhabi. The goal isn’t efficiency for its own sake. It’s trust. When a citizen interacts with a government service and it works – really works – that builds confidence in a digital economy at scale. That confidence is hard to build and easy to lose. We take that seriously.

With ADNOC, the question was never “can AI apply here?” It was “how do we move fast enough, carefully enough, to transform one of the industries the country depends on?” That’s a different conversation than a product pitch. It requires honesty about what’s possible, what takes time, and what the real risks are. That’s the conversation we’re in.

When I’m in Saudi Arabia, the conversations are about scale – how do you build AI infrastructure that becomes an accelerant, not a bottleneck? In Kuwait and Qatar, it’s about depth – making sure transformation reaches the institutions that matter most, not just the ones easiest to move. Different starting points, different pressures. But the same underlying question: what does it actually take to make this stick?

And here’s what I’ve come to believe: the next chapter is harder than the last one. The infrastructure is being built. The investments are being made. The ambitions are clear. What comes next is outcomes – and outcomes are where the real test of partnership begins. Did the skills program actually change what people can do? Did the government platform actually improve how citizens experience their country? Did the AI deployment in that critical industry actually move the needle on something that matters?

Those questions don’t get answered in a launch event. They get answered over time, by people who stayed close enough to the work to know the difference between progress and the appearance of it.

That’s the role I think matters most right now. Not the loudest voice in the room – the one still there when the hard work starts. And across this region, that’s exactly where we intend to be.