In Manama in November 2026
Rahim is in Manama in November 2026, speaking. If you would like a keynote, board session or leadership dinner while he is in the region, the travel is already arranged, so check a date.
Every keynote is tailored after a briefing call, and the larger engagements start before the day: a diagnostic of the client's own people, so the audience hears its own evidence. Whatever the people there agree is written down.
What that has looked like: a survey of fifty of a client's own people run BEFORE the session, to find where judgement had already been handed to tools they had built themselves, read back to the executive team in their own words, then a workshop in which they named four or five of their own processes and rebuilt them; and about 1,500 people joining a session run hybrid from central London at short notice, for a technology business changing AI tools faster than its people could absorb, which became executive coaching for the transformation lead.
Six of the seven engagements published on this site produced further work after the session ended. The seven are set out in full at case studies, each with a line saying what it does not show.
How to read these examples. They are published to show how the work is put together, not as a client list for Manama. Most engagements are covered by confidentiality and are described without naming anyone; where a client is named anywhere on this site, it is with their agreement.
The Kingdom decided the machine is never the one at fault
Bahrain’s General Policy for the Use of Artificial Intelligence, described by ASAR Al Ruwayeh and Partners as the country’s first comprehensive and binding policy on AI use, rests on eleven guiding principles. One of them is human oversight, and the way it is framed is the reason this page exists. On ASAR’s reading, the policy holds that accountability for negative outcomes rests with the relevant individuals, because those outcomes follow from human decisions rather than from the technology itself.
Most AI governance documents say a human must be able to intervene. This one says something harder and more useful: whatever the system did, a person decided to let it. That is the argument this keynote makes, arriving from the other direction, and a Bahraini leadership team does not have to be persuaded of it before the session starts.
What the policy asks of a person, and what it does not
Naming an accountable individual is the easy half. The hard half is whether that person can actually do the job: whether they see the decision in time, whether they have the standing to stop it, and whether they have kept the skill to know it is wrong. A named owner without those three is a moral crumple zone, which is a role that absorbs blame rather than exercising judgement.
That gap is the subject of the session. Where does human judgement have to remain, what has to be true of the person holding it, and what is the organisation doing that removes the practice that built it? The research behind it is published in full at meaningful human oversight.
Two things this page will not pretend to know
First, the policy language above is ASAR’s characterisation, citing the General Policy for the Use of Artificial Intelligence, Version 1.0, 20 May 2025, Information and eGovernment Authority. The instrument itself has not been read here. If the wording matters to your session, it is worth putting in front of your own counsel rather than taking from a speaker’s website.
Second, a bill is not a policy. Bahrain’s Shura Council approved an artificial intelligence regulation bill in 2024, reported as running to 38 articles and as proposing limits on unsupervised AI decisions in fields including law, health and finance. It has not been confirmed here as enacted. So Bahrain has a binding policy for government AI use and, on this reading, no AI statute, which is a distinction worth getting right before a board acts on either.
A policy that puts a name to the outcome
Bahrain's General Policy says the machine is never at fault: a person is. That turns every automated decision in a Manama bank or ministry into a personal question for someone senior. EtonX, the company I founded and Eton College later acquired, had customers in the Gulf, and I have addressed leadership at Barclays. In the session your people name the person behind each system that matters, and agree what that person needs to know to answer for it.
Box of Amazing, Rahim's free weekly letter, has followed emerging technology since 2017. Gulf clients meet that reading in his keynotes and in his advice. Keynotes · Advisory · Box of Amazing
The three keynotes on offer in Manama
Keynotes run 30 to 90 minutes, in person or virtual. A 30-minute main-stage version of each talk is available for conferences, and the full talk runs 45 to 60 minutes. The sector examples are chosen for each audience, around the same argument. All three, with the showreel, are at keynotes, and the programme copy is at the speaker pack.
Drift versus Design is built from your room. Your audience answers five anonymous questions beforehand, their answers shape the talk, and afterwards you get a one-page readout with the three decisions to look at first.
Also speaking nearby: Doha · Riyadh · Abu Dhabi.
Drift versus Design
Drift versus Design: why most organisations hand their judgement to AI without deciding to, and how to design your way through instead.
If a person always answers for the outcome, drift becomes a personal risk. The session finds the decisions nobody in a Manama firm chose to hand over, before someone has to answer for one.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
The accountability principle is the starting point for banking and public sector audiences, and Empathetic Communication the skill: explaining to a customer which person answered for the decision.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a leadership team's own judgement.
A one-page pre-read sets out the accountability principle. The board session then goes system by system, naming the person who answers for each and checking that person still knows enough to do it.
