Thirty years, and almost none of it theoretical
I have been working on the commercial internet since before most companies accepted they needed to be on it. That is not a boast about longevity — it is the reason I am cautious about the things a newer consultant is confident about. I have watched four or five waves of technology arrive with the same promises, and I have been wrong about enough of them to know which questions matter.
Most of what I advise on, I have had to decide for myself, with my own money at risk. That changes the advice. Someone who has only ever recommended architectures has never had to live inside one for three years while it slowly became the reason nothing ships.
Where the time went
AI and Web Consultant — 2025 to present
Independent practice: AI adoption, fractional CTO work, web and product strategy, and visibility across both search engines and AI assistants. Two markets — the UAE, where the work is now focused, and Kuwait, where most of the client history sits.
Founder and product builder — ongoing
Three products of my own are live and two more are in development that I have not announced. Details below.
Managing Director, Tothiq.com — 2022 to 2024
Led a digital contracts platform: product strategy, growth and partnerships, including integration with national digital identity infrastructure. Regulated, bilingual, and unforgiving about correctness — signatures either hold up or they do not.
Copyright and Web Consultant, Al-Qabas — 2021 to 2022
Built a copyright department from nothing for a major newspaper: monitoring, enforcement workflows, and the internal process to make them stick. Unauthorised republication of their content fell substantially. It was also an education in how content actually spreads online, which turns out to be directly useful for the visibility work I do now.
Web Consultant, Faloer — 2002 to 2021
Nineteen years of web solutions, digital marketing, business development, consulting, training and speaking. Engagements included Shell, KNPC, Al-Qabas, Kuwait University, PACI and Arabi Company. This is where the range came from: enterprise procurement, government process, family businesses, newsrooms and startups all buy technology differently, and you cannot advise any of them well until you have sat on the other side of their table.
Marketing Manager, Gulf Maritime — 1993 to 2002
Nine years in marketing before the web became the work. It is where I learned the thing that still governs how I advise: every technology decision is a commercial decision wearing a technical costume. It has a cost, a return, and someone whose name is on it.
What I have built
Advising and shipping are different disciplines, and the second one keeps the first honest.
- UTTER IN — a voice-first AI assistant that turns natural speech into organised, actionable information. Built because capture is where every productivity tool loses people.
- AI Khazna — a bilingual platform for finding AI tools, prompts, agents and workflows that have actually been checked, in Arabic and English.
- POPIN.ID — a digital identity and modern business-card platform, built for one-click sharing with nothing to install on the receiving side.
Building teaches what consulting cannot: how an estimate behaves when it breaks, what users do rather than what they said they would do, and what an architectural decision costs you a year later. When I push back on a scope or a platform choice, I am speaking as someone who has paid for getting it wrong.
How I work
The decision comes before the tool
I do not open with a platform recommendation. I open with the business: who the customer is, where something stalls, what it costs to leave it stalled. The technology is chosen afterwards, and often the answer is to build less than you were planning to.
You deal with me
No account manager, no team you never meet, no quiet handover to someone junior once the contract is signed. That puts a ceiling on how many clients I can take, which is deliberate.
Everything important goes in writing
Recommendations arrive as documents you can act on without me in the room — including acting on them with somebody else. If my advice only works while I am being paid, it was not advice.
I will tell you when the answer is cheaper than me
If an off-the-shelf product does most of what you asked me to build, I will point at it. If the problem is a process rather than a technology, I will say so. This costs me work and earns the engagements that matter.
Why the UAE
Because the gap here is specific and I am useful inside it. The market has no shortage of capital, ambition or vendors — it has a shortage of independent people who will read a proposal critically on the client’s side of the table. A great deal of AI spending in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah right now is going into pilots that will never reach production, and someone has to be willing to say which ones those are.
The regulatory picture is also getting real rather than theoretical: the Personal Data Protection Law, e-invoicing obligations, and residency expectations in regulated sectors. These are now design constraints at the start of a project, not a compliance review three weeks before launch.
Arabic and English
I work, write, build and teach in both. On a bilingual project that is the difference between an Arabic version that was designed and one that was translated — and every Arabic-speaking visitor can tell which is which within a second of landing on the page.
Two markets, one person
My Kuwait practice continues at almoosawi.com. Same person, same standards, different market — this site is the UAE one. If you found me through work I did in Kuwait, you are in the right place.
Writing
I publish notes on this work in Insights, in Arabic and English — AI projects that stall between pilot and production, technology decisions that turn out to be expensive, and the shift from ranking to being cited.