AI won’t replace humans — it will amplify the ones who move fast. That was the core message from tech leaders on stage at the EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum’s The Rise of the Robots panel, where CTO of fintech giant MNT-Halan Ahmed Mohsen, Managing Director and CEO of NBFI leader Contact Financial Holding John Saad, and Co-Founder of AI-powered studio Wondercraft Youssef Rizk got brutally real about what AI will — and will not — do to businesses in Egypt and beyond.

Forget the fear-mongering, the machines are not coming for your job — your inability to adapt will: Contact Financial Holding’s CEO John Saad opened with a challenge to the doomsday narrative: “The myth that robots and AI will replace us puts a smile on my face,” he said, adding that “AI is purely an enabler to make things faster, more efficient, and more productive.” The opportunity is huge, and the only people at risk are those who refuse to learn how to use the tools.

AI is good as a financial-inclusion engine: For MNT-Halan’s CTO Ahmed Mohsen, AI is transforming underwriting instead of eliminating jobs. “Our risk and credit models are constantly becoming much better,” he said. The company is leveraging behavioral data to score customers faster and more accurately, unlocking segments of the population that traditional tools could not price. The result is a more than three-fold increase in approval rates without additional risk. “It took us a year to build, and we saw results five to six months in,” he added.

AI will not run your business, but it will dramatically shrink the gap between the disciplined and everyone else. Wondercraft’s co-founder Youssef Rizk called out the misconception that AI can “do your job for you.” Yes, AI can cut team sizes, however it cannot run your company for you. “95% of AI pilots in big corporations don’t work,” he noted, citing an MIT study. Why? Leaders think they can throw prompts at a model and expect magic outputs instead of investing in editing and refining. ‘AI amplifies you — it does not replace you,” he added.

Build or buy? Everyone loves to talk “AI capability building,” but the honest answer from founders building in the arena is buy first, build later. “If you are optimizing for speed and you’re not super-cost sensitive in the proof-of-concept phase, buy,” Rizk said. Providers have already solved hard problems, build only when scale economics matter or maintenance becomes a moat. “The floor shifts every month, unless you have the manpower to keep up, buy,” he added. Mohsen agreed, Halan builds when AI gives it a defensible edge in credit, everything else is fair game to buy if it gets you to market faster.

Data is the real bottleneck: Structured, high-quality data remains Egypt’s biggest technical hurdle, Saad argued, noting that “Digital data in the past has been scarce.” However, financial inclusion and mobile wallet penetration are fixing that. “There has been much more access to data that is much more structured than before,” he said. This leads to better services not only in the financial sector, but also in the insurance sector and the investment sector.

Egypt’s competitive edge? Talent, expertise, and a cost advantage the world is sleeping on. Egypt’s domain-experts-per-USD ratio is an overlooked strategic edge in a market where global players are spending bns on expert-labeled data, Rizk noted. Chips? We won’t win that race. But training data? “There is a huge opportunity here,” he added.

AI is not plug-and-play: Integrating AI into existing workflows takes a steep learning curve, expect 30-40% productivity gains — not 80-90%, Mohsen said. You need custom workflows, you need team buy-in, and most of all, you need people who know how to think before they prompt.

Leadership reality check: “AI has to be in the DNA of the organization,” Saad noted. Leaders must carve out early wins, showcase internal success stories, and push adoption across every function.

What skill wins in an AI world? Critical thinking and problem framing, or in Mohsen’s language “ask better questions.” Saad sees a magic trio of subject expertise, product skills, and AI literacy. Rizk’s take is harsher, arguing that you need to fight to preserve your ability to think independently as models get better. Do not let AI erode your cognitive fitness.

The thing Egypt’s tech ecosystem should collaborate on? Arabic AI models and anonymized data pools. Mohsen called for shared, anonymized datasets to strengthen model performance. “I don't think it's an easy thing to do, but I think it's worth a try,” he added.

Asked for the one thing business leaders should do tomorrow morning, the panel kept it practical. Mohsen urged companies to rethink engineering habits and weave AI into workflows the right way, experimenting quickly and fixing scalability later. Saad doubled down on his cultural imperative, arguing that AI has to sit in an organization’s DNA, with each unit picking one concrete use case and proving it works so teams rally behind. Rizk cautioned against the temptation to “boil the ocean” with full-platform agent automation. The path to real adoption, he argued, is sharply scoped problems where AI performs best.

The takeaway: AI is not replacing talent. It is exposing who actually has it. Egypt’s edge will come from operators who move fast, deploy smart, and build cultures where thinking and technology reinforce each other instead of competing.

The future does not belong to the robots. It belongs to the humans who know how to use them.

Tap or click here to read the panel’s full transcript.

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