Nour Al Hassan (Arabic AI, Tarjama) on Building Arabic AI from MENA, Why Most Pilots Fail, and Hiring Only A Players

Episode notes

Nour Al Hassan is the Founder and CEO of Tarjama& and Arabic AI, a UAE-based AI company building Arabic-first language models, enterprise agents, and document intelligence systems for governments and large organisations. Before Arabic AI, Nour spent more than 16 years building Tarjama& from a bootstrapped translation business into a profitable, technology-led platform serving global enterprises. That long runway of proprietary Arabic data became the foundation for the creation of Arabic AI, enabling a leap into small language models, agentic workflows, and on-prem deployments for highly regulated customers. She joins the podcast to discuss what it takes to build technology from the region, overcoming internal doubt, why Arabic remains fundamentally underserved in AI, how human-in-the-loop systems will evolve rather than disappear, and why AI adoption fails unless it is driven top-down by leadership rather than delegated to teams.

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