The operations, data & AI practice of Ahmad Alawami
I’m Ahmad Alawami. I help business leaders make smarter decisions and run leaner operations, building on the data, processes, and people they already have. My background at Deloitte and Efficio sets the standard; through Sapiency, you get one accountable person doing the diagnosis, the build, and the handover.
The thesis
In every organization, executives, strategists, and consultants tend to produce stuff that’s too abstract for anyone to act on. On the other hand, the organization’s technology — its tools, systems, data, and especially AI, which are built to help it get things done — sits too far from the business to matter to its vision, stakeholders, or continuity. The company is left in the middle: ambitious, well-equipped, yet driven by the opinions of the day.
That middle is where I work. I make an organization smarter — in its decisions, operations, and technology. I decode where your business value lies first; everything else is second.
You might recognize the week
The presenting complaint is almost never the constraint. The reporting isn’t slow because the tooling is old; it’s slow because three teams define the same term differently, and every number needs a meeting before anyone will trust it.
— the first thing I check, before anything is designed or built
One promise, three faces
Establishing where value and risk actually sit; settling the definitions that make numbers trustworthy; putting evidence behind a call.
An automated quality layer of eleven checks surfaced 712 issues in a single pass, across roughly 700 people and more than forty fields — Saudi Film Festival 12.
Mapping how work actually moves, removing what doesn’t earn its place, and documenting the result so a business runs on a system rather than one person’s memory.
Six separate sign-up forms and their manual routines, folded into one bilingual form carrying fourteen conditional rules.
Reporting that is read, automation that removes real work, and AI applied where it pays — and refused where it doesn’t.
A logged mail-merge sent roughly 714 personalized bilingual messages, with anyone who had declined removed automatically from the send list.
Selected work
The Kingdom’s oldest film festival — held at Ithra in Dhahran, 314 submissions, 50 films screened — needed a single reliable guest list to run registration, hosting, messaging, and ceremony access. It didn’t have one. Larger festivals rent this capability from production companies. Working through Sapiency across roughly seven weeks, I built it instead, from an empty sheet, while the festival was already in motion.
One master of 771 records across ten accreditation classes; an eleven-check quality layer; a single conditional bilingual form replacing six; a daily arrivals-and-departures manifest pipeline, rebuilt around twenty to thirty times across the festival week; a live dashboard with every figure traceable in one click back to the row it came from.
On the countable tasks — the messages, the manifests, the reporting the dashboard replaced — the saving is on the order of one to two weeks of full-time work. That is an estimate, and it is always written as one. The larger saving sits in the matching and validation, parts of which are not realistically doable by hand at all.
I built an arrivals board, demonstrated it, and then shelved it — the operations manager preferred printed manifests. The board was good. It was not needed. Build what will be used, and say so, even when it costs you the more impressive artefact.
“Ahmad’s attention to detail, elegance, and instinct for the optimal path show in every piece of his work. What he built quietly took weight off the rest of the team — rarely flashy or out front, but consistently the thing that kept the operation moving. His data and AI skills are exceptional.”
A Saudi creative marketplace, deciding blind
I audited the data landscape, reconstructed the customer journey, defined a framework of 28 metrics with formulas, sources, and collection cadence, and redesigned how the business captured information in the first place.
Projected An estimated 15–30% improvement in client retention and an estimated 50–150% increase in acquisition — projections, labelled as such every time they appear.
A creative agency at the ceiling of its founder’s capacity
I mapped the value chain, defined the ideal client, built the tracking and templates the business had never had, and redesigned the chief executive’s own role so the company could scale past him.
Qualitative Repeatable rather than heroic selling; documented rather than improvised operations. No numbers are attached to this engagement, on purpose.
Before Sapiency. At Deloitte Consulting, in Core Business Operations, I worked on Vision 2030 engagements — among them, as part of the Deloitte team, the operating design for the delivery unit supervising Saudi Arabia’s National Investment Strategy. At Efficio, a specialist procurement consultancy, I worked on procurement transformation for public and private clients, building the Power BI reporting beneath decisions worth many millions of riyals — as part of the Efficio team.
The person
I read psychology and neuroscience at Calgary, and spent the years before consulting in research laboratories — which sounds like an odd apprenticeship for this work until you notice what it teaches. People are most confident about the decisions they have examined least. And the interesting question is rarely the one being asked.
The work is more literal than the word advisor suggests. I am in the spreadsheets. When two flattering figures about my own impact would not survive being checked, I took them out of my own record. When the evidence runs out, the claim stops.
Specialists come in when an engagement needs them, and I name them. What a client gets is one senior person for the whole of it — the diagnosis, the build, and the finding nobody wanted to hear.
Bring the report nobody trusts, the process that lives in one person’s head, or the AI purchase you’re not sure about. I’ll tell you what I’d check first — including the possibility that you don’t need me.
Employers and recruiters: the same conversation works. Ex-Deloitte and Efficio — I’ve worked the national-scale programmes, and I still build the reporting and the process myself.