Vol. I
Om el Donia
I grew up in Cairo and moved to Canada for university. There's a version of this story that's about the Computer Engineering degree from U of T, but honestly, the more useful education was the one I didn't sign up for. When you grow up between two cultures, you learn to read rooms before you read documentation. You learn that the same sentence means different things depending on who's hearing it and what language they're thinking in.
I speak Arabic, French, and English fluently. Not in the 'I took classes' way. In the 'I've run entire client engagements in French for the Canadian Coast Guard and deployed AI platforms in Saudi Arabia in Arabic' way. Language is how I build trust. It's how I figure out what someone actually needs versus what they're asking for. That turned out to be the skill that shaped everything else.
Vol. II
COVID made me a consultant. Curiosity made me stay.
I started as a software developer at a small consultancy in Toronto called Innovexa. Built a CRM for the Canadian Coast Guard, entirely in French. Led a development team. It was pure engineering, and I liked it.
Then COVID hit and people started leaving. Clients still needed delivery. So I stepped into the client-facing role because someone had to. Suddenly I was running discovery sessions, managing stakeholders, and doing that thing where you sit between engineering and the business and try to get them to agree on what they actually want.
Turns out I was good at it. Not just the communication part, but the pattern recognition. Seeing how a client's problem maps to a technical solution before anyone opens a code editor. Understanding why a deployment is failing before anyone checks the logs. That became the through-line for everything after.
Vol. III
From IC to the room where decisions get made.
Joined Varicent as a Solutions Engineer. Over three and a half years I went from hands-on implementation to owning strategic relationships across 10 key accounts. The title barely changed. The scope changed completely.
The highlight was building a Monte Carlo simulation engine with the CRO of a top insurance company. Replaced their spreadsheet-based forecasting with something that hit 98% accuracy and moved budget decisions forward by four months. I also designed ELT pipelines pulling messy data from legacy systems, gave talks at conferences, and owned every French-language engagement because I was the only bilingual SE on the team.
I also built the SE onboarding program that became the company standard and drove productization of client solutions back into the core platform. The pattern was forming: build something for a client, prove it works, make it available to everyone. I didn't have a name for it yet. It just felt like the obvious thing to do.
Vol. IV
Building a PS practice from scratch.
When I joined Arthur, there was no Professional Services practice. No playbook, no delivery framework, no engagement model. Just a product and a list of enterprise clients who needed help deploying it. So I built all of it. The practice now serves 15+ Fortune 500 enterprises across aviation, insurance, energy, and media.
The work has taken me places. Onsite in Saudi Arabia deploying a full GenAI platform inside a multi-billion-dollar energy company. Building guardrails for a Top 3 airline that renewed at 3x and expanded to the full AI suite. Shipping an enterprise AI assistant for a Top 10 news organization. Designing and deploying a multi-agent RAG system for an Australian insurance company with continuous risk assessment and full observability.
Along the way I built agentic workflows that turned days of documentation into 30-minute jobs, co-built onboarding tooling that cut integration time from hours to minutes, and drove the productization of ML guardrails and a Governance Module into Arthur's core platform. I also partnered with sales on deals ranging from 50K to 500K.
The through-line is the same one from Varicent, just at a bigger scale. Build it for the client. Prove it works. Make it the standard. Except now I'm building the entire practice, not just individual solutions.
Vol. V
Chasing my next adventure.
Outside of work I'm either on a pitch, planning a trip, or deep in a playlist. Football is the constant. Wherever I've lived, the first thing I find is somewhere to play. You'll always find me listening to the newest music, discovering new artists and listening to old classics. Travel ties it all together. Growing up between Cairo and Toronto gave me a permanent case of restlessness, and the list of places keeps getting longer.
New York is home now. The pace fits. The diversity feels familiar. And being close to the people building the future of AI doesn't hurt.
Let's talk.
If you made it this far, you probably have a sense of how I work. Building something complex for enterprise? Standing up an AI practice from nothing? Working across languages, time zones, or regulated industries? That's the work I do.