Why Hilda Maalouf Melki, AI Expert Lebanon, Is Bringing AI Simplified to Substack

Hilda Maalouf Melki, Oxford-Certified AI Expert in Lebanon and the Middle East | Chair, AI & Innovation Committee, Lions Clubs International District 351

For the past few years, I have written about artificial intelligence in places that were never quite mine. A Forbes column has a house style. A press interview gets cut to the quote that fits the segment. A LinkedIn post disappears in a day. As an AI expert in Lebanon and the wider Arab region, I wanted one place where I could think out loud, in full sentences, for as long as the idea needed and not a word longer because an editor said so.

That place is here.

I am Hilda Maalouf Melki, an Oxford certified AI expert based in Lebanon, a Forbes Business Development Council member, and the author of AI Simplified. You can read more about my work at hildamaaloufmelki.com. Before any of that, I spent twenty five years inside banking and digital transformation in Lebanon, which means I came to artificial intelligence the way most institutions eventually have to. Not as a hobby, but as a structural problem that needed solving inside a real organization with real constraints.

That background shapes everything I write. I am not interested in AI as a topic for awe. I am interested in AI as a topic for governance, for strategy, and for honest decision making at the level of a board, a ministry, or a bank across the Arab region.

The institutions that win in the AI era will not be the ones with the best products. They will be the ones that earn trust inside an economy where intelligence is everywhere and verification is scarce.

What does an AI expert in the Arab region actually write about?

I recently wrote two pieces for Forbes that, taken together, say something I believe will matter more over the next decade than almost anything else being written about artificial intelligence right now. The short version is this. The companies and institutions that win in the AI era will not be the ones with the best products. They will be the ones that earn trust inside an economy where intelligence is everywhere and verification is scarce.

I called this trusted intelligence. Not artificial intelligence on its own, and not efficiency gains measured in hours saved, but the much harder and much more durable asset of being the institution people choose to believe when everything else can be synthesized, predicted, or faked.

That idea will run through everything I publish here. It is the thread connecting AI governance, strategy, institutional transformation, and the very specific challenges that Arab region leaders face across Lebanon, the Gulf, Egypt, and the Levant as they try to build for a future that is arriving faster than most governance frameworks can handle.

What to expect over the next ten weeks

I will publish one essay a week here, in English and in Arabic, covering AI strategy and governance, and what I am seeing inside Arab institutions as they try to figure out what AI actually means for them, not what a vendor’s slide deck says it means. Some weeks will expand on frameworks I have already started building in Forbes. Some weeks will be entirely new. All of them will be written here first, in my own words, without anyone else’s house style attached.

If you lead a bank, a ministry, a family business, or simply want to understand what is actually happening across the Arab region as AI reshapes how decisions get made, this is where I will be writing about it properly.

You can also find my book, AI Simplified, at hildamaaloufmelki.com/signature-book. It is where I started making the case that AI does not have to be complicated to be understood, and this publication is where that case continues.

Welcome. Let us begin.