Welcome to EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation

AI is just too hard to use, and it isn’t your fault. What you can do with it, which model is on top, and what works best — it all changes by the week, sometimes even faster. And don’t get me started on how challenging it is to think through what the technology could mean for your life, family, career, or business. (H/t Walt Mossberg.)

AI is shaping up to be the business story of our generation — and it’s also getting a lot of hate. You’re not alone if you feel fear, uncertainty, or doubt. I’m worried about AI, too. But I’m also aware that (a) I don’t have the power to stuff this genie back into the bottle and (b) the last time I was this excited about technology, I was a nine-year-old kid assembling a Sinclair ZX-81 from a kit. It had 1 KB of RAM. Today, I use a smartwatch on my wrist to talk to an AI agent.

Yes, AI could threaten our jobs, upend our businesses, or change the future our kids are preparing for. But it could also help all of us here in MENA+ build things we could never have built before: AI is helping researchers identify promising cancer-drug candidates. Farmers are using it to slash their use of some herbicides by nearly 50%. Banks are using it to make it easier for us to do business with them. Even journalists have found a use for it — here at EnterpriseAM, it’s helping us build podcasts, tear through piles of data, and build tools we use to produce the newsletter you’re reading right now.

So, uh, Patrick? What am I reading? This is the first issue of EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation.

Our mission is simple: To look past the boosterism and doomerism and give you the tools you need to figure out which threats and opportunities are real, what works, and what doesn’t. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we’ll bring you AI news from MENA and around the world; reporting on how it could change our economies; and deep coverage of how businesses across our region are using the technology — including their successes and failures.

And because technology is about a lot more than LLMs, we’ll be going deep into the region’s budding innovation economy — from chip design to biotech.

EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation is produced by a team of journalists led by Joseph Marks. Based in Amman, Joe was previously the lead writer on the Washington Post’s Cybersecurity 202 newsletter and covered the cyber industry for Politico. Many of you will meet him in a few hours’ time when he joins me on stage in Cairo at this year’s EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum: The AI Edition.

Last, but far from least, I’m delighted that our friends at MNT-Halan have come on board as our anchor partner for EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation just a few days after announcing their plans to list their Egyptian unit on the Egyptian Exchange. MNT-Halan shares a lot of DNA with Enterprise: A young, market-leading digital native that’s figuring out what AI is and how to grow across our region at the same time. We’re honored to have them along for the ride — and look forward to having MNT-Halan CEO Mounir Nakhla on stage with us this morning to talk about his IPO — and an AI named Apollo.

And now, here’s Joe. –Patrick

We’re in for one helluva ride

Hello, everyone, and welcome to EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation. We’re in for one helluva ride.

This week starts with a split screen that should spark anxiety in even the most even-keeled tech watcher. In Washington, the Trump administration is in full seriously-just-trust-us mode as it confronts an artificial intelligence industry that is both the most transformative and potentially most dangerous thing to hit the internet since its inception.

The Trump approach in a nutshell: No to new regulations. No to anything that could stifle AI’s growth — or give Chinese AI firms an edge over US hyperscalers. Yes to the industry self-regulating. And yes to some other government mechanisms for enforcing good behavior, like the threat of Justice Department prosecution or investigation by existing regulatory bodies.

Most significantly: The Federal Trade Commission opened a broad investigation last week into the safety of AI systems built by OpenAI and Anthropic, The Washington Post reports. The scope of the investigation remains unclear. So at least there’s some federal muscle reining the industry in.

But remember: This is the same agency that took 16 months to punish Facebook for improperly harvesting data from 87 mn users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, ultimately fining the company USD 5 bn in 2019. That was a record-breaking fine, but also just about one month of the company’s sales revenue at the time. That’s not exactly the regulatory muscle or the timeline you’d be hoping for when a botnet taking over the entire internet — or even chemical or biological weapons attacks — might be in play.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, the dangers of the Trump administration’s hands-off approach are racking up by the day:

• OpenAI agents may have tried to bypass security or have otherwise negatively impacted the websites of 100 or more organizations, the company acknowledged last week. That’s far more than was previously known — and a strong indication that the company isn’t capable of ensuring its agents routinely follow rules and laws.
• In at least some cases, the rogue AI agents hadn’t been instructed to hack anything. They just chose to do so when they couldn’t find the information they were after by legal means.
• The company also fired three human researchers for allegedly sharing company information with an AI safety group, per the Wall Street Journal.

To their credit, leaders of many top frontier model developers have called for a slowdown in AI development to improve safety procedures and urged more government involvement than Trump is offering. But in the absence of those guardrails — and with multi-USD tn IPOs at stake — it’s easy to imagine safety concerns taking a backseat.

What does this mean for MENA+? A more dangerous internet, for starters. The less rigorous the US government and frontier companies are about pre-release testing and auditing, the more likely there are to be rogue agents launching cyberattacks and generally raising the cost of doing business for everyone.

There’s also a heightened risk of AI making geopolitical conflict far worse. Iran-backed hackers are already using AI to hypercharge their cyberattacks against Gulf nations in the current conflict. Imagine what they could do with a new generation of hacking tools that far outpace current cyberdefense capabilities.

The cost of inaction: Trump described his opposition to regulating AI this way during a speech at the UN: “I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution.” But as the costs of non-regulation grow, we may look back and think the cost of regulation would have been much less than the cost of inaction.

Now let’s get to today’s Lede, a deep dive into how AI is transforming the oil and gas industry here in our part of the world. –Joe