Global Tech Leadership: How the UAE is Leading in Technology Innovation

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Voiceover: (00:04)
Welcome to the Executive Insights Podcast, brought to you by AWS, where we address vital questions and share unique perspectives from leaders at the intersection of business and technology.

Tanuja Randery: (00:21)
Hello, this is Tanuja Randery, Managing Director of Europe, Middle East, and Africa for Amazon Web Services. In this series, I have the privilege of speaking with CEOs from across the EMEA region about what it takes to transform business and society, how they are leveraging data and technology to accelerate growth and innovate, and their insights on topics such as sustainability and addressing the digital skills gap. We will also be providing a glimpse into the personalities behind some of our great leaders of industry.

Tanuja Randery: (00:55)    
Today's guest, and the very first one of 2025, is a visionary leader and trailblazer in technology and innovation. With nearly two decades of global experience transforming cutting-edge research into real-world breakthroughs, her pioneering work in quantum-safe cryptography, AI, and autonomous robotics is reshaping industries from healthcare to cybersecurity and sustainable energy. A prolific academic and holder of numerous patents, she is recognized internationally as a leader in advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Among her many accolades are the Special Recognition Award at the Arab Woman Award 2021, held in partnership with the United Nations, and the Wu Prize of Research Excellence from Princeton University, which honors her significant contributions to technology and innovation. And as CEO of Technology Innovation Institute, she is driving innovation on the global stage, cementing the UAE's position as a hub for technological excellence and a home to initiatives like the groundbreaking Falcon LLM. It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Najwa Aaraj. Happy New Year, and welcome.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (02:02)    
Happy New Year, Tanuja. It's my pleasure to be here today. It's an extra pleasure and honor to be your first guest. You know how much I respect you, I respect your role, as a professional, as a leader in the field as well. So, thank you very much for honoring me with this.

Tanuja Randery: (02:19)    
So much is happening in the UAE, and so much of it that you are shaping. Your career is defined by just incredible drive for discovery and innovation, and I'd love to understand how your global experience, and your drive for discovery and innovation, has shaped your perspective on leadership. Was there a particular mentor, a particular book, a particular experience that sparked your passion for technology?

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (02:45)
As far as I remember, I've always had this passion for technology. I'm not one of those kids that, at some age, wanted to be a doctor, wanted to be an astronaut, wanted to be an engineer. I've always wanted to get into a high technological space. I've had inflection points which defined which area of engineering or which area of technology I wanted to get into, but I've always wanted to be in this field, if you will. For example, when you choose your first degree, many times you apply to different universities, you apply to different degrees, et cetera. For me, I applied to one of them. And when my mother, who is a role model for me, told me, "Najwa, what if you don't get there?" I was like, "If I don't get there, I don't want to do a university degree." I think this is called extra confidence, that I would get into, and this is where I got into the computer communication and engineering field.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (03:45)    
When I finished my first degree, I wanted to go and continue further studies, and this is where my first choice, if you will, was to go and start designing new chips. I was lucky enough to get into Princeton, and I got into the program where I wanted to continue, in the VLSI field. And it so happened in 2004 that I had a great advisor, Professor Niraj Jha, and I send him my regards. It was the time where there were the US elections, and there were incidents of breaking the election machine, which was the Diebold machine. And this is where I started getting familiarized more and more with the field of cybersecurity, cryptography, recovering keys, et cetera. And I took a week to go and read more and more about this field, and then after some meditation, I said, "No, I want to shift my whole focus of studies." And I decided to get into cybersecurity.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (04:33)    
And of course, after that, throughout my tenure at Princeton, I had the opportunity to work with many leaders in the field that I learned a tremendous amount from. I got exposed to the applied cryptography field from many leaders in the US, following which I decided that I wanted to improve a little bit my management skills, because I was too much into this technology, but I always wanted to get a little bit of management skills to learn a bit on the leadership skills. So, I decided to take a break. It was not an entire break, but maybe a different focus in the path. I went to consulting, and after that I went back to doing pure technical work. This is where I started again in the UAE, in the field of cybersecurity and cryptography. I joined DarkMatter, I joined His Excellency Faisal, who had a tremendous impact on me as a person, me as a leader, and on my career as well, and I thank him for all the leadership and mentorship that he gave me throughout. And then the rest is history, and I think you know about my path since then.

Tanuja Randery: (05:42)
That's lovely. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you sharing that. It sounds like that combination of your role model mom, your role model professors, mentors and sponsors, but your own drive as well, and sense of purpose, in terms of what you wanted to accomplish, that magical combination, and sponsorship, has led you to where you are. And I think if we can make that a force multiplier for more women around the world, Najwa, I think we'd have tremendous success in that form. Could I just maybe build on what principles guide your leadership style? And how does that then help you ensure not only managing those day-to-day complexities, but also balancing with the sort of big strategic vision on where you want to take TII?

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (06:30)    
I believe the first thing that I look for in a leader, but I make sure that I have and I always exhibit as a leader, is empathy. For me, there is no negotiation on this one. The second one, and I believe this, I had to learn the hard way, is as a leader, you should never be scared to face a difficult situation. Regardless of how tough it is, regardless of how much of a difficult decision to make, or how much of a difficult conversation to have, I don't avoid it. I try to tackle it right on.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (07:04)
The third one is I always try to humble myself. I always consider myself the one that knows the least, and I always try to see in my colleagues things to learn from. And the same way that whenever I sit down with them and listen, because listening is very important, there's a lot to learn, there is a lot to digest, the same way that I expect others to listen to me and also to, if you want, to take few useful learnings from my conversation with them. So, these are, if you want, the top three principles that I go by, and I find them to be actually pretty useful in managing a team, and in particular a large team like what we have today in the Institute.

Tanuja Randery: (07:47)
And a team that is obviously very, very highly intellectual. How are you balancing that, by the way? The ability to be, as we say, in the field with your leaders, spending time with them, listening and understanding and learning, but also then being able to step back and think about the mission, the strategic mission that you have?

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (08:07)
I make sure I have face time with the different leaders, with the different teams, with also my senior management as well. You need time to dedicate in order to take a step back, to think about the strategy of the company, to think about the roadmap of the company. You need time to engage with others across the world to see, okay, what's new? What use cases should we be addressing? What are the hot topics that we should be addressing as well? Because as you know, Tanuja, our aim in TII is of course to look into the technologies that are very relevant to the UAE sovereignty and to the different UAE use cases across various sectors and critical infrastructure. But at the same time, we are establishing ourselves as a global tech leader. And this is very, very important and crucial for us.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (08:59)
In addition to that, you have the operational matters in the organization. You have to go and meet like-minded people. You have to go do meet and greets, you have to do meetings that many times you may not want to do them either. It's not by choice that you go and do them. And you have to balance all of that. Having said that, I make sure that I have one-on-ones. Even though I heard too many opinions about one-on-ones, I really believe in the power of one-on-ones. Keep them short, keep them crisp, 30 minutes every two weeks, sometimes 30 minutes every week. I try to dedicate time every two months to a quarter to go and meet the entire team and see what they are doing, give them feedback, hear back from them, see what are their needs, et cetera.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (09:41)
Sometimes, of course, you need to postpone, and I am known for my lack of time management, and I'm known also for always being late to things, but at the end I make it. I'm trying to become better in organization and time management. But yeah, this is important. I also set half a day a week to take a step back and think about is our strategy the right one? Do we need to change the strategy in specific centers? As an organization overall? How do we interact with the sister companies that we have as well? So, all of this, I make sure that I dedicate time every week, even if it is over the weekend, in order to take a step back and put it on a paper and then think about it.

Tanuja Randery: (10:25)
Well, first of all, thank you so much for your incredible openness and sharing the piece around being late and the time management, because we're not perfect, are we? None of us. And it is what makes us who we are as authentic leaders. And I very much appreciate it, because I don't know how many CEOs would say that, and I love that you did say that.

Tanuja Randery: (10:47)
Just building on the TII and what you're shaping here very specifically, in terms of the global tech leadership that you're driving, and I'd love to get a sense from you about the vision behind Falcon, and where you want to take this and how did it emerge? How did you, as a CEO, encourage the development of something that incredible?

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (11:07)
Actually, Falcon, I think that the credit goes to His Excellency Faisal, that he encouraged the team a few years ago to invest time and to invest research efforts in large language models. The credit goes to him to adopt the strategy of open sourcing Falcon, in particular after. And you know Falcon was open source, the first version, if I'm not mistaken, in April, May 2023? It was one of the first open-source models out there. And since it was open source in the initial version, it has achieved leadership positions on the leaderboard of Hugging Face, right? Of course, there are many reasons behind open sourcing it, but I'm just here passing the message of our leader, is that one is bridging the gap with closed source models, and allowing the mass to have access and leverage, and use the large language models in real use cases.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (12:00)
At the same time, we believe in the power of basically increasing adoption, and speeding adoption of large language models and AI in general in actual use cases. So, you will see much faster progress with the adoption of LLMs and AI in real use cases, whether we're talking about healthcare, whether we're talking about legal, whether we're talking about education, whether we're talking about energy and transportation, and so on and so forth. By open sourcing those models, you get to have more contributions that are focused on privacy of the models, on trust of the models, on transparency of the model as well. So, the work on safety and trustworthiness of LLMs and AI in general also advances much quicker as you have open-source models, and as the mass has accessibility to those. Let alone that, of course, by having those open source models, the mass can use them in order to localize knowledge, localize training, use it for training in your own data set, and if you are able to host a model within your premises, you also ensure the privacy of your data while training, while doing inference, et cetera, et cetera.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (13:16)
And you saw that since we released the first version of Falcon, our commitment to advancing generative AI to open source has not stopped. On the contrary, it's increased. Falcon Foundation was also announced early 2024, and the main aim of the foundation is to increase the adoption of Falcon model to support the various entities, whether they're individuals or businesses, also to tackle specific use cases using large language models.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (13:50)
The other side is while we have a very big, very much capable team led by Professor Hakim on the foundational model and AI, one of the main focuses of this year for TII and for ATRC is to bring AI to life. So, how do we bring AI to life in robotics? How do we bring AI to life in autonomous cars? How do we bring AI to life in drones? Et cetera. You will see further and further announcements from TII on this specific area.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (14:21)
The third item that is very high also on our roadmap this year is how can we work on privacy-preserving machine learning? How can we develop frameworks for private training of large language models, for private inference, and private federated learning? And you will also see a lot of technology on this front that is coming out of the Institute.

Voiceover: (14:45)
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Tanuja Randery: (14:58)
Going back to some of the use cases you mentioned in particular, and I've heard you say this, so maybe I will quote you for a second, Najwa, where you said, "Our focus is on taking these innovations and making them work for the betterment of society." And I'd love to get your thoughts on how you're seeing the leverage of AI machine learning, and by the way, it's not only generative AI, but even the strong data foundations that are necessary to be able to drive the impact that we need, particularly in healthcare or in the area of sustainable energy.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (15:29)
Yes, it's actually a very good question, Tanuja, and let me break the question into two parts. How can we use AI and bring it to life? And the reason why we want to bring it to life is for the betterment of the human life, and also for the betterment of the society, the betterment for the climate, the betterment of nature, et cetera, et cetera.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (15:48)
So, first we're using LLMs and AI for agricultures and climate change and climate prediction, weather prediction, et cetera. So, we're working on using AI on drones for ecosystem restoration. And, in fact, this is one of the main technologies we worked on, and we launched as a startup through our sister company with Reda in VentureOne, and this is Nabat AI. Nabat AI uses AI to provide technology for agriculture and for ecosystem restoration. Our first offering that we went public with is for mangrove restoration that are related to mapping, seeding, and monitoring after their seeding. And this is a whole cycle that mangrove restoration and even mangrove plantation has to go with the mapping, the seeding, and the monitoring. We're using AI, in fact, in the marine vehicle space to do restoration of ecosystems underwater. We're working on AI in order to develop new material, in order to develop cyclable brakes, and let alone how you use AI for energy management, for analytics, et cetera, et cetera. So, there's a whole lot where you can use AI for sustainability, climate management, and other applications.

Tanuja Randery: (17:09)
I just really love those stories. By the way, we've been hugely focused on this topic ourselves, as you know, as Amazon, in terms of our focus on the climate and climate pledge, with so many signatories committing to doing this, including with the rainforest and other things. But I think the amount that can be addressed in this space with the leverage of data insights and AI, I think we finally have the opportunity to address the sustainability challenges that we're facing, and biodiversity challenges. So, it's just wonderful to see you really not only driving in terms of both what businesses can achieve, but also how society is going to benefit from this. This is the other thing that I picked up from researching about what you're doing at TII, is the collaboration that you're driving. So, your partnerships, the work you're doing globally, both educational, technology partnerships, et cetera, has been really important to helping you scale and get the benefit of global expertise. Maybe talk to me a little bit about how that's fueling some of your vision and some of these priorities.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (18:20)
So today, we have around 1,000 researchers that are across the 10 various research centers that we work with. So, this is resident staff that we have, of course, across the different positions that are driving the execution of the roadmap. In addition, every center, they have a board of advisor, and this is a board of renowned professors, renowned researchers, renowned technologists that are working in different areas that the center touches upon.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (18:53)
In addition to that, we have collaborations with academic institutes and research institutes, including AWS, across the globe. So, we have those partnerships with around 100 plus universities, from the East to the West, with around 38 countries. And the way we work on these collaborations is we identify professors that are experts in a specific field, we conduct, jointly, collaborations with them. And this collaboration would be very relevant to the projects and to the roadmap that we are pursuing in a specific center in TII. At the end, you cannot have everything in-house. You should be willing to collaborate with others, and others to collaborate with you, in order to leverage more and more expertise, and then bring it to our roadmap and the technologies that we are producing.

Tanuja Randery: (19:46)
And this as well creates, I'm sure, a phenomenal environment for your talent, right? Where they are able to share their perspectives and experiences and learn from this incredible group of global partners that you've got working with you. In fact, that was one thing I did also want to lean in with you on, because the whole skills gap issue is one that everyone is talking about. I think there's no CEO I meet who doesn't talk about the difficulty in harnessing the skills that they require in order to be able to deliver, and then to continuing to grow and develop that talent, and nurture that talent, and create the culture where you have this ability to learn. How are you creating that culture where your team members are challenging, feeling comfortable challenging, but also creating, innovating, and growing?

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (20:38)
Being an institute that only focuses on technology, you will not be a successful institute. I always refer to this triangle. For you to deliver something successfully, you need to have three dimensions. You need to have the dimension of the technology itself. You need to have the dimension of policies, processing, and governance. And then you have the third dimension, which is super, super important, which is the human capital and the team, right? And today, without a team, you cannot deliver anything.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (21:09)
Let's put it as simple as this, right? We have 1,000 researchers in TII. They come from 84 countries, nationality-wise, and also where they worked before. So, you can just imagine the variety of cultures that they come from, right? And culture is not only the culture on the personal level, but also the culture in terms of how do we innovate, how risk averse are we? Do we aim for solving short-term problems? Do we aim for solving medium-term problems? Do we aim for the moonshot? So, it's different mentalities, different cultures, different way of approaching research and innovation, right?

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (21:52)
And I think this is what makes TII a unique place. I would say a majority of the research projects that we have on the roadmap are successful, are highly innovative, because of the talent that we have and the different backgrounds and the different curiosity that we have across the team members and, of course, in addition to their technical skills and high professionalism as well. From our side, what needs to happen is you need to have an incentivizing environment and values in the company, so that these individuals keep going, these individuals keep contributing, and they don't feel that they are not heard. That different perspectives are welcome, but they need to be open at the end to take the perspective that is proven to work in the longer term.

Tanuja Randery: (22:40)
I love that you bring that up, because people talk about psychological safety as something that's really important to enable organizations. I think you just described it super well, in terms of encouraging that culture of asking questions and challenging, but also moving on, because you can't spend your time just constantly in circles challenging each other. Just given where we are with AI and generative AI, how do you see these technologies supporting your researchers, augmenting, accelerating, helping with automation? Are you leveraging it internally from a productivity perspective as well?

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (23:20)
So, starting with automation and bringing efficiencies to shared services, it makes lots of sense, especially when you're talking about procurement processes, HR processes, legal processes, and finance processes. Definitely that's the area where you want to implement generative AI. When it comes to research, there are few areas that we have identified and we're working towards, if you will. One is research itself. Second is tools to be able to gather as much as possible of what is happening on the advanced technologies, new technological areas, a summary of what is happening in the world, how is research being used in applications and use cases? What are the new startups or the new, let's say, unicorns that are out there? What are they working on? Et cetera, et cetera. So, as a desk research tool, it becomes super useful, let's say.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (24:18)
Today you have lots of tools that are using code, code analysis, source code review, static analysis, et cetera. They can be super helpful. We even, at some point, are exploring, I would say, more neural networks in AI to find properties and cryptographic algorithms that might show vulnerabilities or weaknesses in those cryptographic algorithms. For example, can I use AI to find differential traits in the algorithm? This is the type of research, if you will, and how are we leveraging AI and LLM to solve a specific challenge, or solve a specific technological challenge that we're looking at?

Tanuja Randery: (24:58)
I know within Amazon and AWS, we are actually leveraging our Q Builder and Q Developer tools to help improve productivity of our coders. And you can imagine that this can actually really help more junior engineers really get the expertise of the senior engineers. Imagine an LLM that kind of captures all that in one place. So, I do think productivity across the board, whether it's at the back end or the front end, or just to improve. We did it at BT, and they launched it, and they were able to get rid of 12% of tedious tasks, for example. So, I think there's a lot more to be done there, but it will also require mindset and behavioral changes, in order for us to be more effective with it.

Tanuja Randery: (25:46)
Maybe with the time we have, one last question for you. It's just been a phenomenal conversation and thank you again. But as the first female professor at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, and the recipient of the Arab Woman Award, you've broken a lot of barriers. I'd love to just get your advice or your sense of what the future holds, with respect to more inclusion, particularly in the STEM world.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (26:14)
Sure. Look, I think what I'm going to say might sound a bit controversial, coming from a woman in science and woman in research, et cetera. But to me, as Najwa, given the environment where I grew in, I never felt that my capabilities, my ability to learn, my ability to execute, my ability to shine is less because I'm a woman, right? And maybe this is why I always had the courage to take a step forward and not think, "What if I'm rejected because I'm a woman? What if I fail because I'm a woman? If I pursue a math track, I will fail, because I'm less capable than a man." This never held me back. Even today as a career, the opportunity that I got and the opportunity of growth that I got here in the UAE has been phenomenal.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (27:12)
At the same time, I'm very well aware that this is not the case for all the ladies and women and the girls out there, right? And I believe it's a mission for me to show girls, as they're growing up, to show ladies, as they're pursuing their degrees, especially in STEM, to show women that they're going through their careers, that they can achieve it. They can find a balance between their personal and their work life and then reach places. And that's why I try to mentor today as many ladies as we have here in TII. I like to go and share my experience in women in science forums to listen more, to give them career advice, et cetera. Not that I know it all, but I believe my experience, and going through this as a woman, can help them somehow. I'm very proud that today, almost 30% of the TII population and researchers are women and are ladies. And we try our best to give them the right conditions and work circumstances to continue and then get into places and get into leadership positions as well.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (28:21)
But I must say too that the UAE is one of the places where, out of personal experience, I feel that there is a lot of encouragement for women to be in STEM, a lot of encouragement and respect for women to shine in, let's say, quote, unquote, "non-traditional" career path for women. And it's also one of those places that the way you treat a woman scientist, and a male scientist, is the same. So, there is equality with how they are being treated, and this helps a lot with the growth of women and having them aim for leadership positions in those fields.

Tanuja Randery: (29:06)
Incredible place to end our conversation and hopefully begin a new one when we see each other. But I feel like it's very nicely represented our conversation today in your philosophy, which is whatever we are doing today, we can do better tomorrow. I really appreciate the time you spend with us, Najwa. Thank you so much for sharing, for breaking boundaries, for being such an incredible role model. And for challenging yourself and all of us every single day as well.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj: (29:34)
It was an incredible discussion. Thank you for all the answers. Thank you so much.

Voiceover: (29:40)
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