David Boast, general manager for UAE and KSA at Endava: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the business community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of business questions for fun. Speaking to us this week is David Boast, general manager for UAE and KSA at Endava (LinkedIn). Edited excerpts from our conversation below:

I’m David Boast. I'm a father of four — I’ve got three boys and a little girl. My younger two live with me here in Dubai. We've lived here for nearly two years. I’m a big lover of motorsport, cricket, and Star Wars, and I’ve been getting back into online gaming a bit as well, because my son started to take an interest in Fortnite.

I'm also a big lover of coffee, which has been very much driven by the quality of roasteries in the UAE and Saudi. I really enjoy trying out the different types of roast and drawing the perfect espresso. It’s like a blend of art and science — from weighing the beans out to grinding them and tamping it properly and getting the right temperature and pressure.

Endava is a technology services company, so we're working across multiple different sectors with customers to identify problem domains and bring the right technology and people on to address those problems. AI is one of those key tools that we use to enable that, whether it's for building a new payment gateway for a payments company or for digital acceleration or modernization for a retail company. One important one we’re working on now is building a port community system for the Port of Fujairah.

A while back, there was this Y2K rush, and everyone was testing and wanted to make sure they had the Y2K-ready badge. I see AI now as one of those badges and I think while it's really important to have an AI strategy and we help lots of customers do that, understanding why you're doing it is actually the more important thing. There's a bit too much AI for AI's sake, but purpose is everything.

Hallucinations are also getting quite strong now — there was a news story the other day of a broadcaster that had been feeding transcripts into ChatGPT so it memorizes them and comments on improvements they could do on the show. One week, it generated an entire script for a podcast that had never happened.

It’s important to understand that at its roots, generative AI is a derivative probability model. It's not creating new content, so you have to understand its limitations. It’s also important to make sure the creative parts of what we do are taken into consideration so the human aspects are coming together with the technology.

My day always starts with putting coffee on. My wife expects a perfectly made latte with some decent latte art, so I have to do that first thing. I then have two or three espressos, depending on how much time I have before I get out the door. I help the kids get ready where I can, and I drive my wife to her job and come into the office.

Depending on what time I get up, I occasionally go for a walk. I’ve got in the habit of doing a 5 km walk, either before the sun comes up because it's quite hot at the moment or in the evening just for exercise.

When I get into the office, I get more coffee — it tends to be the V60 pour over when I get in rather than espresso — and I read Ground News, which is very interesting because it pulls news from different sources and judges and grades it depending on whether it’s left-biased, right-biased, or center-biased, or whether it’s factual. It gives me that balanced view of what's going on in geopolitics and on the macro level, because ultimately that filters down to all of us in terms of what we do every day and can have an impact one or two years down the line. I think of that as kind of like playing chess.

Then there's playing checkers with the issues of the day, from the customer issues that need to be prioritized through to the admin tasks. I've also got a global strategic delivery role, so that keeps me busy.

I enjoy watching things like Black Mirror on Netflix because they're quite dystopian, and I love looking at the possibilities of technology. I like to look at the positive spin on it and how we can avoid that happening. The other thing I watch is YouTube. I've got a love for cars and motorcycles, so, there's a guy called Mat Armstrong on YouTube who takes crash-damaged cars and rebuilds them, and there's something about the process of stripping a car back and then rebuilding it and making them look almost brand new at the end of it that I love.

On a personal level, my goal is to keep treating every day like a school day where I’m learning something new, challenging myself, and keeping myself in that awkward space where I’m always improving. I also want to continue my health journey — I’ve recently lost a lot of weight and I now want to build up some muscle. I used to lift a lot of weights in my twenties and train quite extensively, so the goal is to get back to that.

Our family motto — and that’s something I try to live by myself — is to try your best and be kind to others. I think if you can do those two things, that covers off 95% of what you need to do.

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