Spotlight on Fahed Bizzari, Managing Partner, Bellamy Alden

As is the way , Fahed tells of how a 10 day stop over in Dubai, led to a seminar in Costa Coffee re Ai in 2023, on Wasl Road led to repeat seminars. The stopover never ended!

SPOTLIGHTS & INTERVIEWS

Fahed Bizzari,

11/6/20268 min read

Let's start with you. What brought you into your particular area of AI, and what has kept you passionate about it?

I've spent my whole working life exploring how technology and systems can make human effort go further. That started in 2002, when I began building an automated business and eventually led into the world of systematisation and digitisation. A recurring question through all of that was how to take knowledge held by one person and make it useful to others.

ChatGPT’s arrival finally delivered a highly efficient and effective answer to that question and I became entirely absorbed by it within a few days of its launch. When I got to Dubai in February 2023, for what should have been a ten-day stopover, I found virtually everyone almost oblivious to its existence. When an old colleague asked me to take her through it, I offered to run a free seminar instead. That took place at the meeting room in the Costa Coffee on Wasl Road. That led to more seminars, then a two-day programme I delivered on a repeat basis throughout 2023. The stopover never ended.

What keeps me passionate is seeing how AI continues to make us all more and more capable. I love that for myself, of course, but it also brings me a lot of delight to empower others.

Your business has evolved over time. What has changed most about the products, services or solutions you offer to clients — and why?

Our work began with teaching people how to use AI. We saw genuine breakthroughs in those programmes, but once people went back to their normal working week, they found it much harder to retain and apply what they'd learned. That experience helped shape the distinction I make between AI adoption and AI empowerment.

AI adoption means using AI, regardless of how often, how well, how safely or for what purpose. AI empowerment means harnessing AI’s power to expand what you can do. I call the gap between using AI and harnessing its power the AI Empowerment Gap.

Helping organisations close that gap has broadened our work into leadership, governance, competence, culture and systems. Training is now just one part of that.

We’ve also recognised that organisations fall into two broad categories: those with capable AI leadership and those without. For those with capable AI leaders, we provide programmes, tools or specialist support as that leader needs. For those without, we enter a partnership in which we provide the direction and structure needed to build what we call ‘AI Empowerment Programmes’ so that their people can take over when we leave.

AI and technology are fundamentally changing the HR and Learning landscape. How have they changed what you offer, and what are clients asking you for today that they weren't asking for three years ago?

AI has definitely changed how we deliver our work. In our early days, I did all the training, so our ability to serve clients and grow was capped by me. These days, our AI tutor delivers most of our workforce training, supported by our AI facilitator that monitors completions and follows up with delegates who fall behind. That means we can serve far more people without everything depending on my availability.

As for how client asks have changed, in some cases they haven’t changed at all. We still get requests that could easily have come in 2023, especially from companies that have not truly acknowledged that the future of work has already arrived.

In other cases, the vocabulary has advanced, while the understanding behind it has not. Someone will ask us, “How can you help us implement agentic AI?” But when I ask them what they mean by “agentic AI”, they don’t have an answer. Even when they can, I'll ask why they want it, and they’re lost then as well.

Are you seeing organisations genuinely embracing AI, or are many still trying to understand where it can actually add value?

Both, and you can find both within the same organisation.

For example, we recently had a discovery call with an investment company where one person on the call was already building things in Claude Code. It was clear everyone else was lost on AI, but they let him represent them.

My concern was that the company would become dependent on him without developing much capability elsewhere. If he left, they could still have what he'd built but lack the knowledge to maintain it, adapt it or develop it further.

But the bigger issue is everybody else. If their use of AI is limited to the solutions he codes, then their ability to benefit from it depends on what he can build for them. They aren't learning to spot opportunities in their own work, explore them with AI and develop their own ways of using it.

This is why I differentiate between individual AI empowerment and organisational empowerment. The organisation needs to help people across the business develop that capability, then establish the systems and ways of working that turn it into a lasting organisational strength.

That’s why my book's subtitle is “How to turn scattered AI use into a lasting organisational strength”.

What do you think AI will make redundant in your particular area of HR, Learning or Talent — and what will become even more important?

AI has already made trainers redundant in our company, even though we do so much workforce training.

In the days of group sessions, we couldn’t take more than 30 delegates in a single cohort without degrading the training experience. Then, within each cohort, people had different questions and levels of understanding, as well as different work to apply it to, and I only had so much time to cover it all.

AI has now solved all of these problems for us and, in doing so, our AI tutor has made human trainers almost entirely redundant. It uses context about each client’s business and each delegate’s role and responsibilities to explain every concept or test in the context of their individual work realities. This means a company with 10,000 employees can offer that private tutor experience across its workforce without increasing the number of trainers. Delegates can then interact with our AI tutor if they need further explanation, a different example or want to spend more time on a topic they haven't yet understood. As a result, I personally deliver training only for senior leaders.

What becomes more important is the human expertise needed to decide what people should learn, design the teaching and judge whether they can apply it. We also have to check and improve what the tutor teaches and how because those decisions affect more people as the training reaches further.

From your experience working with organisations across the Middle East, what are HR and Learning leaders getting right at the moment — and where are there still significant gaps?

In my experience, the ones who get this right focus on what people can actually do after the training programmes rather than the training programmes themselves. They want to know that what they learn will make a meaningful difference to work that matters. The challenge is that, because HR and Learning leaders are all new to AI, they usually underestimate what’s needed to make that meaningful difference. Each initiative teaches them more about what their people need, but then another quarter or two are wasted finding out. Fortunately, we carry those lessons from one client to the next, so they don't have to discover everything for themselves.

Then there are the practical constraints. Some leaders expect a single session to be enough, while others have a limited budget, or in some other way, have their hands tied. Even where HR wants to do more, managers' priorities still win. Those who believe in AI fight to make time for it, while others leave that time unprotected or prioritise other things.

Has the Middle East market become more sophisticated in the way organisations buy from you? What are today's clients looking for that perhaps wasn't important three years ago?

Whatever changes there are, they’re definitely not uniform, and as I said earlier, we still get requests that could easily have come in 2023.

The main difference we’re seeing is an increase in organisations appointing dedicated AI leaders who are much clearer about the support they want from us. For example, they might ask us to facilitate an intervention to surface AI use cases across the company and nothing more. They may already have an in-house engineering team or plans to work with an IT provider, and the role we play is just to help them surface AI use cases. And we’re okay with that. We’ve developed an ecosystem of offerings that feed into each other for those clients that want us to lead the way as their partners. But we’re also happy to deliver individual components to those who only want them.

What is one misconception about your area of expertise that you would like to change?

The biggest misconception is that AI is an IT challenge with a people component.

When leaders hand the whole thing to IT, everyone else is left in a vacuum, even though they keep hearing the world around them talk about AI. They see friends and relatives doing all sorts of interesting things on all sorts of platforms while they’re stuck waiting on IT or trying to use IT-driven solutions that offer a fraction of the functionality others access through their tools. Not only that, but they’re left with an entire list of unanswered questions relating to their roles, futures and identities as career people.

That’s why you’ll often hear me say that AI is a people challenge with an IT component, not an IT challenge with a people component.

If you could give one piece of advice to an HR or Learning leader trying to prepare their organisation for the next five years, what would it be?

If they’re planning any AI-related programmes, I’d advise them to plan for what happens after the learning before they commission it. Workshops can allow for useful practice and retainer support, but what matters is how well they can apply it to their actual work. If they can stretch programmes across weeks, delegates can implement lessons in real work situations and get support for the obstacles they face along the way.

Looking ahead, what is the one development, trend or change that you believe will have the biggest impact on your business?

As we build towards more AI-first work, I believe the biggest impact will come from combining professional expertise with engineering in the same role. If your readers are unfamiliar with the idea of AI-first work, it means that AI does the operational work while people manage it. So instead of doing the work it’s taken over, they design how it should do the work and then give it the instructions, context and tools it needs, test how well it performs and keep improving it. Only an expert in training can do that effectively because only they know what good training requires, including things they might never have had to explain before. But they’d need to combine their training expertise with the ability to engineer the AI. Fortunately, with the plethora of no-code/low-code solutions and feature-rich assistants like ChatGPT and Claude, AI is much easier to engineer these days than it was a few years ago. That’s what I mean by combining professional expertise with engineering in the same role.

What are you working on right now that you're particularly excited about?

The one thing I’m most excited about is spreading our Staying Safe with AI programme far and wide. Because the solution provides that tutor-like experience to an infinite number of people, we can help an incredibly large number of organisations massively reduce their AI exposure within just three weeks. It doesn’t matter whether they have 10,000 employees or just 10, Staying Safe with AI can be deployed across all of them.

And finally, outside of work, what is something your colleagues or clients might be surprised to learn about you?

People are often surprised by how human-focused I am. They hear how enthusiastic I am about AI and assume it's all I care about. On the contrary, I'm very empathetic towards the human experience, including the uneasiness around AI. I feel it for them. Remember, for me, AI is all about making human effort go further, not replace it.

I think people would also be surprised how much I love live entertainment. I'd choose theatre over cinema any day, and I'd much rather attend a comedy show than watch Netflix. For me, being there is a big part of it. I love the human experience, and that interest in people runs through my work too.

Is there a question we haven't asked that that you'd like to answer?

I'd ask who should be responsible for making all of this work across the organisation.

We can't expect HR and Learning to do this on their own. They can't change every manager's priorities, decide what good work looks like in every function or start making decisions about how work should change as a result. They need the authority and support of the wider leadership team.

Fahed’s profile: linkedin.com/in/fahedbizzari