The data function
I lead Data & AI for Samaya at group level, reporting to the Director of Strategy.
The brief is simple to state and hard to do: every number the group runs on should be available, trusted, and one question away.
Makkah, Saudi Arabia
FAHEDMAHIDI.
The AI systems behind digital transformation.
Director, Data & AI at Samaya, the group that builds and operates historical, cultural and Islamic museums. Director at HiHala, the ticketing platform becoming a services platform for people visiting the Two Holy Mosques.
01
Now
I build AI systems that run a business, not demonstrations of one.
The platform
A group warehouse fed nightly from ticketing, two ERP instances, e-commerce and web analytics.
Scheduled business intelligence on top of it, and alerting that reaches people rather than a dashboard nobody opens.
How I work
Automation before headcount. Dashboards over decks. Scoped sprints instead of vague programmes.
KPIs treated like product metrics, and the uncomfortable question asked early rather than discovered late.
02
Systems in production
01
A group data platform. One warehouse, fed every night from five sources, with scheduled reporting and alerting on top.
The unglamorous half. Most people who can demo a model cannot show the pipeline underneath it.
02
A natural-language analytics product that answers business questions in English and Arabic, and grades its own confidence.
Applied language models over real company data, bilingual, with a trust model attached.
03
A supervised team of AI coding agents. Supervisor and reviewer on different models, workers on isolated branches opening pull requests.
Per-agent budgets, an audit log and a morning digest. Orchestration, not a chat window.
04
A model evaluation practice. Seven models scored on one fixed question set, which is how we know which one to pay for.
The two most expensive frontier models lost to the one we run. Almost nobody measures this.
05
A generative media pipeline producing the weekly executive video, with every figure rendered deterministically.
A synthetic presenter and a cloned voice, and a hard rule that no model ever draws a number.
06
An agent memory service, partitioned so personal and staff material can never reach a multi-user application.
Data protection thinking applied to AI systems, before a regulator asks for it.
03
Experience
Employment and ventures together, most recent first.
SamayaEmployee2026 — present · Makkah
Director, Data & AI
I lead the group's data and artificial intelligence function at group level, reporting to the Director of Strategy. Before it existed I ran the group's digital marketing across close to a hundred social accounts and twenty-nine brands. The reporting broke before anything else did, so I built the platform that fixed it, and the company turned that work into a department.
HiHalaEmployeeAug 2025 — present · Saudi Arabia
Director
A ticketing platform for events and partners, extending into services for visitors of the Two Holy Mosques in Makkah and Madinah, on its way to becoming a platform for the pilgrimage journey. My remit spans product, data and commercial.
SofthouseFounder2020 — present · Malaysia & United States
Chief executive
A software engineering and digital consulting company working in JavaScript, TypeScript, Elixir, Phoenix, React, React Native and Vue. Mobile, gamification, user experience, continuous delivery and remote practice, alongside fintech product management from requirements through to team supervision and testing.
Fintech super appVenture2018 — present · confidential
Product & Promotion
A fintech venture building a super app. I work across product and promotion, shaping what gets built and the team that delivers it. The work is ongoing.
ZAD GroupEmployee2015 — 2020 · Saudi Arabia
Software division manager
Ran the software division through a digital transformation programme: portfolio management and resource allocation, technical strategy across hybrid mobile, DevOps and QA, agile delivery from product backlog to sprint review, and product definition from workshops through to user testing. Coordinated a software and design team of twenty-five people across four continents, and presented digital strategy to executives and stakeholders.
Advertising networkCo-founder2013 — 2015 · Egypt
Digital project & engineering manager
Built and ran an advertising technology startup serving an ecosystem of more than one thousand three hundred websites, with its own ad serving, scraping and scaling infrastructure. A Google policy change ended the model overnight. The best lesson in platform risk I have had.
MyriawebCo-founder2010 — 2013 · Roubaix, France
Digital project manager
A digital consultancy doing startup consulting, user experience auditing, requirements and specification, dynamic prototyping and team coordination, for Total, GDF Suez, E-On, Olympique de Marseille, Salomon and Paris Saint-Germain.
Barbedouce.frFounder2012 · France
E-commerce
Founded the first e-commerce business selling beard care products in France.
Megalo & CompanyEmployee2007 — 2009 · Paris
Functional project manager
Project initiation documents, requirements, functional specification, dynamic prototyping, planning, technical team briefing and user testing, for BMW, Google, Lancel, Symantec, Orange, Sage and Sauter.
04
Projects
One-off things I built, inside a role or outside one.
Provenance platformcurrent · personal
In build
Proving an object is genuine and tracing who has owned it, using chip verification and a hash-chained custody ledger. Written in Elixir and Phoenix.
eLearning portfolio2017
Portfolio management
A two-year programme delivering twenty-five mobile learning applications, built with an engineering team I established in Istanbul.
ManasikVR2016
Virtual reality
Conceived and led the build of a mobile virtual reality application that let future pilgrims walk through the landmarks of Makkah before travelling. At the time the idea was still considered a gimmick.
BMW & Vous2009
Customer relationship platform
A platform letting customers interact with BMW across the whole lifetime of their car. A four million euro programme.
05