When I launched this publication ten weeks ago, I wrote that I wanted one place to think out loud about artificial intelligence without someone else’s house style attached. What I did not fully anticipate was how much the conversation with readers would shape what I wrote week by week.
This final essay of the first ten weeks is not a summary. It is a dispatch from the questions I am actually hearing from leaders across Lebanon, the Gulf, Egypt, and the Levant as I work through AI strategy and governance with them in real time. Some of these questions appeared in the essays I published here. Some of them are still being worked out. All of them feel more urgent than they did ten weeks ago.
The question that has changed most over ten weeks is not how to adopt AI faster. It is how to move fast enough to remain competitive while building the governance and trust infrastructure that makes that speed sustainable.
What questions are Arab leaders actually asking about AI right now?
The first question, and it comes up in almost every serious conversation, is about accountability. When an AI system makes or influences a significant decision, whether it is a credit approval, a risk classification, or a customer communication, and that decision turns out to be wrong, who is responsible. This is not a philosophical question for the people asking it. It is a practical governance question, and most institutions do not yet have a clear answer. I wrote about this in week five, on what Lebanese banks get wrong about AI governance, and it remains the area where I see the widest gap between where institutions are and where they need to be.
The second question is about trust, specifically about how an institution builds and maintains the trust of its customers in an environment where AI is being used to make decisions that affect those customers but that the customers themselves cannot see or verify. I introduced the concept of trusted intelligence in week one and developed it further in week six. It is the concept I return to most often in advisory conversations, and I believe it will define competitive positioning in the Arab region’s AI economy more than any specific technical capability.
The third question is about sequencing. Leaders understand, at a conceptual level, that they need to build AI readiness before they can expect AI to deliver value. What they want to know is what to do first. In week four I outlined the five dimensions of AI readiness for Arab institutions, and that framework has generated more direct responses than anything else I have published here. The dimension that consistently surprises people is governance maturity, specifically the recognition that governance needs to precede deployment rather than follow it.
The fourth question is about the Arab region specifically. Leaders want to understand whether the frameworks being developed in the United States and Europe are applicable to their context, and if not, what is different. In week eight I made the case that AI ethics is not a Western luxury but a regional imperative, and that there is a genuine opportunity for institutions in Lebanon, the Gulf, Egypt, and the Levant to develop governance frameworks that address their specific context rather than simply importing frameworks built for different regulatory and cultural realities.
The fifth question, and the one I find most interesting because it is the one that has changed most significantly over ten weeks, is about speed. Earlier in the year, the dominant question from institutional leaders was how to accelerate AI adoption. Over the past few weeks, I am hearing a more nuanced version of that question: how do we move fast enough to remain competitive while building the governance and trust infrastructure that makes that speed sustainable. That shift in the question is itself a sign of maturity, and it is the question I intend to spend the next ten weeks exploring in depth.
What comes next in this publication?
Over the next quarter, I will be going deeper on several of the threads this first ten weeks opened.
I will write more specifically about AI governance frameworks that are designed for Arab region institutional contexts, drawing on the regulatory developments I am tracking across Lebanon, the Gulf, and Egypt. I will explore the leadership capabilities that AI strategy requires, which are different from the capabilities that digital transformation required and that most leadership development frameworks have not yet caught up with. And I will keep writing about trusted intelligence as the concept I believe most accurately describes what durable advantage looks like in the AI economy.
If you have been reading since week one, thank you. If you arrived somewhere in the middle, the full archive is here and I recommend starting with week two on value reconfiguration and week six on trusted intelligence as the two essays that best represent the thesis of this publication.
If you know a leader in Lebanon, the Gulf, Egypt, or the Arab region who is working through AI strategy or governance questions, I would be grateful if you shared this publication with them. The conversation is most useful when it includes the people who are actually making these decisions.
You can find more of my work, including my book AI Simplified, at hildamaaloufmelki.com. And I will be back next week with the first essay of the next quarter.
About the Author
Hilda Maalouf Melki is an Oxford-Certified AI Expert, an Official Member of the Forbes Business Development Council, Chair of the AI & Innovation Committee at Lions Clubs International – District 351 (Lebanon, Jordan & Palestine), and the author of AI Simplified (الذكاء الاصطناعي ببساطة).
With more than 25 years of experience spanning banking, digital transformation, brand strategy, and artificial intelligence, she advises executives and institutions on AI strategy, AI governance, responsible AI adoption, and institutional transformation. Through her writing, speaking, and advisory work, she helps leaders move beyond AI hype to practical, strategic implementation that creates measurable business value.
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Website: hildamaaloufmelki.com