AI keynote speaker in Dubai.

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Who he is

Rahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI (Kogan Page, 2026) and founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. He is based in London and speaks worldwide. He founded EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College, and led Quizlet's international expansion across sixty countries. The argument rests on research across more than 200 organisations in 30 countries, published openly with every source graded.

The argument

AI rarely takes a whole job. It takes the first draft, the initial analysis, the routine review. Those were also the tasks through which people built the judgement that made them senior. The work still ships and the output often improves, so nothing triggers an alarm.

The question for a leadership team is whether the organisation is drifting into AI through a thousand small reasonable decisions nobody quite made, or designing it by deciding in advance where human judgement has to remain.

Three keynotes

Drift vs Design, the signature keynote for boards and executive teams. We Are Superheroes, the seven human skills that grow more valuable as tools spread, for whole organisations and conferences. WTH, What the Human, a live judgement test for boards, December to March only. Full descriptions at keynotes.

Dubai, and the rule almost nobody quotes

Rahim has spoken in Dubai, including at Dubai Arbitration Week, and travels to the Emirates regularly.

Dubai wrote something into its 2019 AI ethics guidelines that most global frameworks still have not. It requires that systems informing significant decisions face quality-checking equivalent to those applied to a human employee taking that type of decision, and that organisations operating AI hold sufficient knowledge of the nature of the AI systems they use so as to be able to know their suitability for the use case. That is a competence requirement, and close to the argument in these keynotes.

Three things a Dubai audience should know about it. It is non-binding. It is seven years old. Its external audit provision is marked suspended, for want of any audit mechanism. And it is published in Arabic only, so it is rarely cited.

The binding instrument in the Emirates is DIFC Regulation 10, which treats an autonomous system as substantially similar to an employee for liability purposes and creates a named Autonomous Systems Officer. It addresses who is answerable. It does not ask whether that person could do the work being supervised.

The UAE also publishes no official statistic on AI adoption or AI-related employment, so every UAE adoption percentage in circulation is vendor-produced. Worth knowing before one appears on a slide.

The full verified picture for the region, with every document read at the issuing body's own page, is at AI and work in the Gulf.

Practical

Keynotes run 40 to 90 minutes, in person or online, tailored after a briefing call. Booking is usually three to six months ahead. Delivery is in English only. Travel from London to Dubai where the brief justifies it.

Written by Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. The research is published openly with every source graded. Found an error? Tell me and it is corrected on the page.