Senior managers gather around gleaming conference tables, precisely laid out pages of strategic plans, and high-flying change roadmaps in boardrooms worldwide. Five-year plans, digitization initiatives, and culture transformation initiatives are zoomed through PowerPoint decks with lightning speed by consultants. The promise is seductive, the determination seems rock-solid, and the enthusiasm is evident. But months later, these same managers are faced with a bitter truth: there continues to exist stubbornly enormous gap between performance and strategy goals.
This is not an issue of any one company or geography. Organisations of all kinds, whether manufacturing giants or healthcare chains, Silicon Valley start-ups or older banks, all struggle with the same universal problem: how to translate strategic vision into real, lasting change. The statistics are gruesome: study after study prove that 70% of transformation initiatives fail to produce intended outcomes, not due to poor strategy but due to executional flaws.
There is a greater than ever need with Middle East banking emerging and fintech and digital disruption challenging banking tradition. Regional banks are more under pressure than ever before to digitize, improve customer experiences, and compete with fintech disruptors and mainstream global competitors. For most regional bank chief executives, the biggest challenge is not whether change is inevitable or not, but how to harness it.
Come Abdulla Alawadi, the very embodiment of back-room banking expertise and cutting-edge technology. In Kuwait’s financial industry’s shining skyscrapers, where modernity and tradition blend into a seamless entity, Abdulla Alawadi stands out in Kuwait International Bank (KIB’s) headquarters. He has but a single query on his mind: how to bring change on a large scale effectively. As General Manager of Strategy and Change Management, Abdulla Alawadi directs the bank’s strategic direction, Programme Management Office (PMO), Change Management, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), and market intelligence and insights. But his most recent innovation, an agentic AI solution ESSAM.AI, best embodies his entrepreneurial heart and vision for the organization’s future transformation.
“Building a new strategy is always very relatively easy and enjoyable thing to do,” Abdulla Alawadi affirms, his voice full of the assurance of a man who has guided many strategies. “It takes us two to four months to come up with it, and then we roll it out and we make announcements that we have a new strategy in place. The show is over, and we’ve enjoyed creating it. And then the heavy lifting starts; new strategy implementation.”
This frank observation broaches a timelessness that has perplexed business managers across all sectors: the disconnect between strategic intention and operating procedure. For Abdulla Alawadi , it was the impetus that launched an innovation that not only revolutionized his own business but may possibly rock the manner in which businesses everywhere pursue continuous process improvement and change management.
The Genesis of Innovation
Abdulla Alawadi started to construct ESSAM.AI with a core grasp of organizational dynamics. During his time at KIB, he realized that it is not always a matter of possessing the right vision. It’s more of a matter of redefining the means by which individuals work, cooperate with others, and carry out their mundane daily chores.
“When we develop a new strategy, we start with pinning down a new mission for us to run after,” he says. “Getting there will definitely push your limits. To get there, most of the time, it’s a transformation—a large-scale change. And in order to create that, you typically need cultural change. In order to create cultural change, you need people change, because people together define your culture.”
It was through such an understanding that Abdulla Alawadi came to epiphany: it is processes, and not people, that drive change. In KIB, he had pinpointed approximately hundreds of processes that continuously had to be optimized to increase chances of successful strategy implementation. The task before him was intimidating; “how were my people ever going to wrap their heads around such a behemoth on so limited resources and a short time span?” he says.
“We needed to optimize hundreds of processes, but I don’t have 100 employees to get this done soon enough to facilitate successful implementation of our new strategy,” says Abdulla Alawadi . This limitation, instead of being a limitation, is what compelled him to begin his most ambitious venture yet.
The Birth of ESSAM.AI
With the specter of not being able to recruit dozens of process specialists looming large, Abdulla Alawadi used innovative thinking. Leaning on his business acumen and insight into technology as well as organizational dynamics, he chose to develop an agentic AI-powered solution for applying process improvement to the organization as a whole applying Lean Principles.
The outcome was ESSAM.AI, a very sophisticated agentic artificial intelligence solution, which through a seamless chat-based interface baseline your current process, analyse, and optimize it in a matter of minutes, then sum up all this smart work in ppt file ready to present! The technology represents a benchmark step in how operational excellence is being addressed by organizations. It puts high-level process optimization in the hands of anybody with a browser and minimal communications skills.
“ESSAM.AI actually performs the process improvement itself, so you don’t have to be a process guru,” shares Abdulla Alawadi . “You don’t have to learn Lean or Six Sigma or Total Quality Management, or be a process engineer to make that possible. You just need a browser, and you can chat with the agentic AI that I built (ESSAM.AI) and it will do the heavy lifting for you.”
The technology operates by introducing a new “inverse prompt” approach, where the AI takes charge of information collection instead of expecting users to enter structured data.
From the typed or verbal natural dialogue, ESSAM.AI will collect your process elements, draw out your current baseline process, analyse it applying ESSAM framework, design a new more efficient process, and sum up all this smart work in a ppt file ready to present.
Revolutionary Capabilities
What differentiates ESSAM.AI from other process improvement software is the fact that it’s an end-to-end, full scope tool. The platform detects issues, as well as provides end-to-end solutions that are ready to be implemented.
“It will then map out your current process for whatever process that you are trying to streamline,” Abdulla Alawadi says. “Then it will validate it for you and inform you that we found some redundant work in your process which we suggest you to rectify by doing X, Y, and Z. It will also calculate your present process numbers and inform you this process now takes 20 days to execute and the efficiency ratio of this process is just perhaps 10 or 20 percent,” he goes on to explain. But the platform does more than that. Users only need to instruct ESSAM to go ahead and optimize the process. ESSAM.AI builds a completely optimized process workflow with standard operating procedures and complete documentation. Everything is rolled up into a clever professional PowerPoint presentation that can be shared and given to teams immediately.
“It will provide you with a step-by-step walkthrough of all the steps in the process,” Abdulla Alawadi continues. “It’s very revolutionary in that respect. You don’t have to outsource and hire 10 new process experts anymore. I just have tens of individuals use it, and I don’t even need to train someone to be a process expert because the agentic AI is the process expert doing all the work.”
Shaping Organizational Effectiveness
The potential effect of ESSAM.AI on KIB or any organization using it is phenomenal. What previously would have required days or weeks of expert scrutiny now requires 10 to 20 minutes. This incredible saving in time and money allows organizations to gain efficiency, increase productivity, lower cost, recover lost revenue, and improve CX without digging a hole in their pockets.
The rewards are more than efficiency advancements. By allowing process optimization for front-line employees, ESSAM.AI has put innovation on an equal playing field. Team members who previously couldn’t assist with optimizing processes because they didn’t have expert training can now assist with optimizing their work processes using ESSAM.
“We’re saving a tremendous amount of money on hiring process expert,” claims Abdulla Alawadi . “Second, we’re not spending a day or two of setup, learning and refining some process. Now we do it in minutes—10 to 20 minutes, you’re through, and then you can just pick it up, present it, and begin executing it,” he goes on.
Strategic Integration and Project Management
Uses of ESSAM.AI far outweigh normal process streamlining. Given that strategy is implemented on project at a time, ESSAM is a gamechanger in eliminating one of the most pernicious impediments to project delivery success: glacial bureaucratic procedures that strangle project milestones.
“Each time that we choose a project and we begin to implement it, we have a lot of processes that are not simple, that are very bureaucratic, take a lot of time and really prevent us from being in the place to deliver project milestones,” goes on Abdulla Alawadi .
“Project managers do have a respectable number of projects that initiate large-scale change, and you need to manage that change by making it clearer, more efficient, and optimizing the processes you’re going to apply,” he explains. This process improvement in project management is a holistic approach of organizational change that takes into account the structure and the culture of change. By insuring processes to act as the pillar for optimized strategic initiatives right from the beginning, organizations are actively maximizing their opportunities to implement successfully. In fact, building an Agile PMO (project management office) starts with reducing waste to promote an effective streamlined project delivery.
Though his real title suits him well with his corporate persona, his real persona is that of a businessman. “Behind the accolades and the titles of executive, who is Abdullah?” he asks himself in rhetorical tones. Abdulla Alawadi is an entrepreneur at heart, with a rumble in his belly for inventions of wide appeal.
This entrepreneurial spirit pushed him to develop ESSAM.AI to seamlessly streamline continuous process improvement. Abdulla Alawadi provides ESSAM.AI as a subscription solution, so teams across the globe can employ the very same next generation agentic AI capabilities to supercharge process improvement at any organization.
“I am going live today, as a matter of fact, so you can actually visit ESSAM.AI and you can actually subscribe and be able to start utilizing it, optimizing your business processes immediately,” Abdulla Alawadi states, highlighting his commitment to spreading innovation to the global business community. “Our initial marketing campaign will focus on GCC markets, then MENA, then the rest of the world,” he explains.
Industry Recognition and Thought Leadership
One of the most popular keynote speakers in demand, he is a familiar presence at Middle Eastern gatherings, and recently gave talks at events in Dubai and others scheduled for September.
“Most of the occasions in fintech and banking forums where I am a keynote, whenever I have to go, I am promoting ESSAM and making them understand how extensively AI has been adopted in our region,” he says. His talks are not much about the technical capability of the platform but more about its application to bring about higher efficiency levels across the region.
The gesture of approval is a testament to broader industry recognition that Abdulla Alawadi response is truly revolutionary. “We’ve yet to see widespread deployment of agentic AI take place in large organizations in the GCC,” he asserts. “Perhaps the possible use cases are overwhelming, which renders teams confused and not knowing where to start,” he explains. “I think ESSAM offers great value for organizations looking to gain efficiency, improve productivity, lower cost, recover lost revenue, or improve their CX,” Abdulla Alawadi discloses. “This could potentially be the highest ROI compared to any other tool they’ll adopt,” he adds with a confident smile.
Cultural Transformation Through Technology
In some sense, Abdulla Alawadi work with ESSAM.AI is a theoretical manifestation of the ability of technology’s function to resist cultural change. ESSAM does not merely fix broken processes. It allows for companies to reconsider how work is actually being carried out and the opportunity for employees to be involved in continuous improvement activity in a fashion that was not even possible before.
We’ve never seem this level of empowerment facilitated with technology to perform process improvement at scale. It sees the maximum value technology can deliver, not in its potential to replace human ability, but to augment it and make possible new kinds of collaboration and innovation.
“Organizations will use ESSAM to change processes, which changes the way people work and act, which collectively results in cultural change,” Abdulla Alawadi explains. “This puts you on a path to successful transformation.
Future Implications and Industry Impact
The implications of Abdulla Alawadi results extend far beyond the walls of one bank, let alone the entire banking and finance sector. Where, in all industries, firms are grasping the challenge of swift adaptation and ongoing betterment, such as that ESSAM.AI provides the key to sustained change.
The capacity of the platform to democratize process improvement speaks to one of the greatest organizational change questions of all time: how to get the whole workforce involved in continuous process improvement. By overcoming the barriers that generally kept process improvement out of the hands of highly trained professionals, ESSAM.AI allows organizations to leverage the knowledge and experience of their entire workforce.
Such democratization has very serious implications in new economies. Perhaps here no trace of advanced-level learning could be there, but perhaps there could be a compelling requirement for operational performance. Through making availability of cutting-edge process optimization technology simple via conversational interfaces, offerings like ESSAM.AI can level the playing field for any size and location-based business everywhere in the world.
Technology Behind the Innovation
While Abdulla Alawadi bears the main burden of commercial use and implications of ESSAM.AI, the technology in itself is an extremely advanced exploitation of the science of artificial intelligence. The “agentic” feature of the platform; i.e., it is autonomous to search and execute advanced protocols; is characteristic of more advanced phases of natural language processing and evolution of machine learning.
The ESSAM.AI reverse prompt approach is particularly revolutionary in the context that it is a departure from the typical AI interfaces, which assume the presence of users’ knowledge of question-asking. Instead, ESSAM takes it upon itself to ask the necessary data and present it to users regardless of technical expertise or process improvement know-how.
This is a longer curve for AI to more human, conversational solutions that learn to respond to the needs of people rather than requiring people to learn to adapt to the technology. That ESSAM.AI can do this is an incredible demonstration of the potential power of understanding this curve can have in refashioning not just how we interact with technology, but how that technology enables us to address complicated organizational challenges.
Lessons in Leadership and Innovation
Abdulla Alawadi experience from identification of a problem in an organization to development of a market-responsive innovation is a lesson in leadership for other innovative leaders. From what he has learned from his own experience is the significance of the technical potential and human dynamics that make or break whether innovations gain traction and stick.
And, above all, perhaps, his work shows that constraint can be a source of inspiration for creativity. With impossibility in the hire of dozens of process gurus, Abdulla Alawadi did not just accept constraint, he imagines a new process of process improvement. This made possible a solution to his immediate needs while it created new possibilities for organizational innovation.
His second position as entrepreneur and corporate executive still places the spotlight on being entrepreneurial despite being in a conventional firm. Far from being overwhelmed with conventional methods or organizational hold-back, Abdulla Alawadi out-of-the-box thinking is what allowed him to innovate much differently.
The Road Ahead
With ESSAM.AI growing even more powerful in the marketplace, Abdulla Alawadi vision for growing it only increases. The strengths of the platform today, amazing though they are, merely scratch the surface of what can be achieved when advanced AI is applied to organizational issues. Its higher value remains beyond process optimization to such basic questions as how organizations may better align and function in an ever more dynamic, complicated business world.
He adds, “I already have a very extensive features backlog, which could potentially turn ESSAM into a business transformation platform”. He goes on, “soon users will be able to assess their strategies, determine their change readiness, build product value maps, perform project scoring for prioritization and much more.”
To the GCC region as a whole, with its emphasis on diversifying the economy and digital transformation, tools like ESSAM.AI are pivotal steps towards constructing more effective and competitive economies. With Abdulla Alawadi announcing the rollout of ESSAM.AI to GCC markets, the prospect of economic impact continues to arise.
Redefining Transformation
Alawadi’s own history is really one of re-experiencing what is possible in change management. In the blending of profound business process intelligence with entrepreneurial talent and state-of-the-art technology, he created something that gets to the heart of one of the most stubborn business problems: how to bridge the strategy-implementation gap.
His findings indicate that the greatest advances are not in the form of a sequence of incremental adjustments to further refine the current solution. They are all about viewing the problem from an entirely new perspective. Instead of even trying to make process improvement cheaper or quicker, Alawadi posed a more fundamental question: what if we might be able to somehow make it available for everyone?
That answer, ESSAM.AI, is more than an engineering breakthrough. It’s a vision of organizations as responsive, adaptable systems in which every employee has the capacity to drive transformation and ongoing improvement. In an era where only the speed of change is speeding up, maybe such a vision will be revolutionary, but increasingly inevitably required.
As Alawadi sharpens and further evolves ESSAM.AI, and as organizations continue to realize the revolutionary potential, his work validates the strength of entrepreneurial thought applied to bottom-line business problems. In Kuwait’s shiny towers of financial center, and in boardrooms and meeting rooms increasingly in the Middle East and globally, his revolutionary process improvement app (ESSAM.AI) may redefine what can be accomplished through organizational change.
