IAMAI: MENA's first Arabic-dialect AI super app.

Delivered by Mehdi Nadifi during his tenure at Majid Al Futtaim.

Situation

Majid Al Futtaim and IAM+ (will.i.am) formed a strategic joint venture to develop an Arabic-first conversational AI super app for the MAF ecosystem. Progress stalled due to conflicting executive priorities, an unfocused feature wishlist, absence of a defined MVP, lack of integration architecture, and no clear path to production.

Mandate

Assumed ownership of the product blueprint, reduced the scope to a viable MVP, and designed the integration layer connecting multiple MAF services with external partnerships under a unified account, wallet, loyalty system, and AI experience. Led a cross-functional team of 23 across AI/ML, UI/UX, product, and business units.

What was delivered

IAMAI went from concept to production testing in six months. It became MENA’s first Arabic-dialect conversational AI super app, built on GPT-3 with custom dialect support. The first LLM guardrails in the MAF ecosystem, including latency and cost SLOs, were established during this engagement.

What this proves

The gap between a funded AI initiative and a shipped product is almost always architectural, not technical. Reducing a 30-feature wishlist to a governed MVP, then designing the integration layer to make it real, is the work most firms cannot do.