The Next AI Superpower Isn’t Who You Think

| Saudi’s $Trillion Transformation — What Changed in 10 Years You're in Saudi Arabia and it's racing to become the world's third largest AI provider. Speaker 2 We're leapfrogging, going straight to exporting tokens and away from exporting hydrocarbons. There are really 2 hot pockets of where talent sits today, and that's Silicon Valley and China. And I think if you make it in the US, you could make it anyway. We're setting up some of the biggest AI factories in the world and data centers. Speaker 1 There is such a demand of data centers, but a lot, a lot of concern about their energy usage. What's your take on how we can reach the AI era beyond just data set? At 25 years old, she walked into Dow Chemical Saudi Arabia and convinced them to make her head of government strategy, the youngest person and the only woman to ever hold that role in the country. And then just a few years later, she became the first woman to make partner at AVC firm in Saudi Arabia. She joined Softbank's $100 billion Vision Fund Next, and she backed Tabby when Buy Now Pay Later was a foreign concept in the Middle East. It's now worth $4.5 billion and heading for an IPO. In 2025, she launched Wild VC, the first AI native venture fund to come out of the Middle East. Her name is Tala Al Jabri, And today we're going to talk about whether we're in an AI bubble, whether AI engineers are going extinct, what she saw at Davos that scared her, and what Saudi Arabia looks like from the inside at the most transformative moment in its history. This is AI across borders. Let's go. Hi, Tala. Welcome to AI Across BORDERS. Speaker 2 Thank you so much Asha for having me. I'm so excited to be a part of this. Speaker 1 Well, I'm really excited because you're in Saudi Arabia and it's racing to become the world's third largest AI provider. And for someone watching this who hasn't been back and let's say 10 years to Riyadh and Saudi Arabia, what would really surprise them and impress them? Speaker 2 Wow, wow. Well, as you know, Saudi has changed a lot and we're leapfrogging, going straight to exporting tokens and away from exporting hydrocarbons. But the real story really sits with the people and just the cultural shift, I think, which has captivated the world. So if you went back to Riyadh 10 years ago, 2016, I think that is such a marquee date because it's literally the year that, you know, Vision 2030 was announced, right? And all of us appreciated and saw the ambition and the vision of His Royal Highness Mohammed bin Salman. But we couldn't have imagined the transformation that would take place over, you know, the next 10 years. And so when I think back to that moment when he announced Vision 2030, I remember I was sitting in an office. And in fact, in those days, I was a management consultant. And my client was a very little known entity at the time called PIF. And I was literally sitting in their offices and, you know, with my colleague sitting and watching the video. And I remember, you know, one of the first requests that came through, you know, what was like a ten person team when PIF was first coming up. A lot of them are still there was Hey, do you have contacts to Disney? I'm like contacts to Disney. We don't you know, we don't do entertainment in in Saudi. What are you talking about? You know, we don't even play music in public, and you want to talk to Disney. And when I think about, you know, my time, I think I was very fortunate that as a client, I was able to do that project that, you know, the team was just so respectful and allowing me to share the space with them. Because back in those days, of course, we had segregated workspaces. We had segregated restaurants. You know, people lived privately behind, you know, the four walls of their homes. You know, we didn't practice entertainment outside in public. It wasn't really deemed appropriate. Fast forward to today, Savvy is one of the largest investors. I mean, AI aside, largest investors in entertainment and sports were attracting some of the most high profile, you know, athletes in the world to be based in Saudi. It's just completely transformed, right? Even just a couple of days ago, you know, we hosted the WWE. I didn't even know it was going on. You know, my driver told me it was going on. And so things are just so, so radically different in a way that is unbelievable. Speaker 1 I can, I can certainly say from my experience, I didn't see the Saudi before Vision 2030. So the Saudi that I saw, the women that I saw were already driving, they were working in offices. They were full of confidence. And that was the first time in my first exposure to the country and to the different cities because I went to quite a few cities in Saudi. But you've also worked in Silicon Valley, you've worked with SoftBank. | The Talent Mindset Powering Saudi’s Rise What is special about Saudi Arabia's talent? What makes it different at this moment in time? Speaker 2 I think what's incredibly exciting, right? I think there's no denying that there is an air about Silicon Valley, right? There is a spirit, there is a culture that makes it conducive to people generating new ideas and taking risk. And it's unmatched around the world. In Saudi Arabia, I see that same spirit. I see people being feeling empowered, especially by their leader, to to contribute to their country. You know people have made it their life's mission to help contribute to us achieving Vision 2030. Speaker 1 I I totally agree, Tara. I think that before people would just be impressed by the sheer wealth of the Kingdom. But now when they come, the caliber of the people they're meeting, the ambitions, the creativity, the, the discipline that's emerging around every single sector, the maturity curve that Saudi is going through is incredibly impressive. And I certainly feel it with all the exposure that I've had from PIF, from the Ministry in Technology and even the women that I met, I think it was in the mom at a small medium enterprise businesses that they were running. They came up to me and they're like Doctor Aisha, you know, we want to do this with AI and we have this business and we want to use data this way. There was a fearlessness, a passion, a belief that the country was going somewhere, which was everywhere that I saw. | Why Women Are Becoming Saudi’s Secret Growth Engine And I think that that is that's what excites people when they come. Absolutely. Exactly what you said is the is the passion and that it's just the tip of the iceberg. A. Speaker 2 Hundred, 110%. I remember when I was a graduate student, I ran research to show because at the time we had some of the lowest participation rates of women in the workforce. And I showed, my research showed that when you bring more women into the workforce, when more women are looking for jobs or employed, actually, that increases productivity, right? Because I think the concern among some people, not not most people, but some people, is when you bring more people on to the workforce because, you know, for a long time women were not engaged in economic activity, you're going to take away jobs from the men. And actually what's happened in Saudi is we've managed to diversify even more from oil and we've managed to be more productive at doing those things. And so when you bring on creative, motivated talent into the workforce, especially in the case of Saudi with women, you stand to benefit as a country, as a nation, as a whole. Speaker 1 And then that very much stands true for every country. | How Tala Broke Into Venture Capital We have consistently seen that not using half the talent pool in a country, it doesn't benefit anyone because then no growth happens. And so all genders kind of lose out then both men and women. Now you were the first woman to become a partner at AVC firm in Saudi Arabia. That's a big deal. And you were named Woman of the Year in finance from Arabian Business in 2022. So tell us about how you ended up in venture capital in the Middle East. Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, what I'll say is I obviously stand on the shoulder of giants, right? And, you know, none of these accomplishments could have happened without incredible female role models that I've had in my life. How I ended up in Venture is, you know, I started my career management consulting. Like I mentioned, I went to Graduate School in the US and at the time, you know, I've always been attracted to people who think differently, who want to change the world and make an impact and aren't afraid to be different. So when I was in Graduate School, I had the chance to sort of experiment with investing. And, you know, I started out, you know, really drawn to impact investing. And that's how, you know, that pivot ended up happening at the same time. So this was, you know, fall of 2016, I there was a firm that just kind of exploded onto the scene called SoftBank Vision Fund, which did this insane deal with, you know, Saudi Arabia. And I was like, I want to work for this fund. And so I made it my mission to, to find my way in and, and, and meet those guys and, and convince them to hire me and that I would make a good candidate for their mission. | Inside the $100B SoftBank Vision Fund And so I was, I'm really drawn to people with big missions. And, and certainly, you know, Masasan never disappoints. That was my my foray into VC. Speaker 1 And what was it like working with Masasan? I mean, you know, we hear about him all the time, but what was it like being his team? Speaker 2 Muscle son, it was above my pay grade. I met him, you know, I had the pleasure of meeting him maybe, you know, 2-3 times. Worked with incredible people like at the firm and I think we were all very drawn to his ambition. I mean, whenever we thought, you know, we were like exceeding, you know, whatever, like the ambition was or like if whatever visions we had, like he would just exceed that every time. He's always thinking bigger. He's always pushing the founders to do more. And so, you know, this is someone who lost his money once, remade it, lost it again, remade it. I mean, it's, I mean, you've got to admire, you know, his his just conviction, right about things. | Building the Middle East’s First AI VC Fund And so I feel really lucky that, you know, I got to sort of live and work in a culture like that. That really pushed me to think bigger. Speaker 1 And then you started your own AI fund in 2025, Wild AI and, and it's the first AI native fund in Saudi Arabia. It's $50 million. Tell me what your philosophy is for the fund and also tell me what do you look for in founders that you fund I. Speaker 2 Mean, I mean, for us, the ethos of the VC sort of really aligns well with the mission of what this region's trying to accomplish. Dr. Ayesha, as you said at the very beginning, right, Saudi is among the top, you know, countries when it comes to how they score on AI supremacy, right? We have low cost of energy. We're setting up some of the biggest AI factories in the world and data centers focused on AI acceleration. We have a population that is, you know, very enthusiastic about using AI with high adoption rates both on the consumer, prosumer and enterprise sides. We are at the forefront of crafting regulation and policies that protect data but at the same time promote innovation. And so we have all these factors working for us. The one factor that we perhaps score the weakest in is on depth of AI talent. And obviously, that's driven by a number of things. But if you look, if you take a step back and you look at, you know, just global trends, there are really 2 hot pockets of where talent sits today, and that's Silicon Valley and in China. And so how our firm really came to fruition is we identified that there's a very unique opportunity to set up a firm from this region to invest in the best of class talent that is creating businesses that are category leading in the AI native space. And so by investing in that talent, perhaps we can make the region strategic to their business and help connect those companies with strategic opportunities in our part of the world, especially among the Gulf countries. And So what we look for in terms of talent is we are called wild because we are looking for wild minded people, people who think like we were describing massive Sun, who see a different vision for the world, who have strong conviction, high ambition and are not afraid to take a risk, who want to dominate the categories that they're in and you know, are not afraid to take that leap. | Connecting Silicon Valley and the Gulf We look for founders that, you know, have a learning mindset, want to listen, want to be on top of things. And hence hence the name wild. Speaker 1 I'd love that name. I did not know that was the origin story of the name. So are you looking for founders all over the world or just in the Middle East? Speaker 2 So our focus today is actually looking at founders in the Bay Area. We really want to be the bridge between the region and the Bay Area. We also, as you rightly mentioned want to promote local talent. What we find with local talent based in this region is they like access to a large market like the US, right? And I think if you make it in the US, you can make it anywhere, you can become global. Number 2 is, you know, they lack access to, you know, some of the top VCs that operates in Silicon Valley, right. Those are companies that have been around for decades that have a lot of value to add from a go to market side to product development, you know, strategic organizational design, a whole host of things. And so I think they can benefit from having a VC like that on their cap table. And So what we try to do is connect them with those BCS through our network. We try to connect them through to enterprises. We have an incredible venture partner based in the US. Her name is Michelle and Michelle was a partner of go to market at Andreessen Horowitz. So she supports our founders from this region access the the US. So we really want to back founders who are thinking big picture. | The Startup Solving Last-Mile Delivery I want to dominate, not just be, you know, the MENA, the the top founder at MENA, but really be the top founder in the world. Speaker 1 I, I see that bold vision that you keep talking about coming through in you and in your founders. So tell me about some of the companies that you've invested in that that you are very impressed by? Speaker 2 We're obviously such a fan of all of them and you know, they each one has, you know, their own superpower that I really admire. I would love to talk about a company called Nash. So Nash is a company that does that has a logistics orchestration platform for last mile delivery. They service some of the biggest retailers in the world like Walmart. Walmart's also an investor in them. They closed their Series A a few years ago. It was led by A16Z. The two founders who started the company are actually from Saudi Arabia. They're MIT trained, so went to grad school at MIT, have known each other for a very long time. And what's so incredibly exciting is, you know, they made incredible traction since, you know, they were first founded in the US and are now expanding to the MENA region, right? And still have roots here. One of the founders, you know, his family is based in in Saudi Arabia still. And he sort of juggles between the two markets. | Why Perplexity Could Challenge Google But this is like a great example of founders who are really visionary, big picture thinking, are doing incredible things, but then also bringing it back home to our region. Speaker 1 And you also invested in perplexity, which is kind of, you know, people think it's directly taking on Google. And, you know, some VCs are afraid of that kind of fight. What what do you think? You know, we don't have to particularly talk about perplexity versus Google. But in general, do you think there is an opportunity for some startups to take on the, you know, a handful of big tech giants in the world with AI and really become that big? Speaker 2 When we invested in the company, this was July of 25, so we participated in their series E and again, you know, they met a lot of our criteria, you know, extremely ambitious founders, you know, who want to be category leaders and in in their respective field. Of course, Perplexity is a technology that doesn't develop it's own foundation models, but really is a layer on top. And so it benefits from any progress that you know, Gemini or Open AI or Anthropic do. However, where they compete is as you rightly mentioned, Doctor Ayershad, they both have, you know, chat bots that you can use and perplexity to launched an AI browser a few months ago. But what makes perplexity really remarkable is the fact that. You can always refer back to the sources of the generated content. And so the chances of hallucinations is really, really low. And This is why consumers rely on it, especially for more complex, more technical tasks like in financial services and and healthcare. But you can really use it for, for really any, any use case. And it's really my, my first go to when we invested in the company today. I think there's huge opportunity for perplexity to really go all the way because it's product is extremely differentiated. I see a lot of exciting sort of use cases and exit opportunities for them in the future. | Are AI Engineers Becoming Obsolete? You know, I think what they built is is incredibly special and having a very technical team who really are best in class is so incredibly important and it's a huge differentiator. Speaker 1 I truly believe that there are a specific set of AI engineers that have to have a lot of expertise, and they are the ones who build the fundamental AI tools, applications and models. And then the rest of the professionals will use AI all the time, become fluent in how to use them. But we will need and that will be relatively small group because it requires them to have a lot of experience or a talent OR a spike or a wild kind of proclivity for it. But I totally agree with you. And those are the companies that we are seeing at least in terms of there's a foundation layer and there's one above it and then the application layer. We're seeing a lot of people come in who might have been software engineers and others who are reusing these other AI companies lower down foundationally on the stack. And I certainly want to talk to you about that because, you know, there's, there's always this rush to invest billions of dollars, not just 1,000,000 billions of dollars into foundation models or even those that use them, but then add their own AI models to be better. | Vertical AI: The Next Big Tech Opportunity And you have said that you would want to invest in vertical AI. So what is vertical AI and how is that different and how is that more pertinent perhaps in the world that we're entering? Speaker 2 Perplexity doesn't need to spend billions of dollars building data centers either, at least not today. So that makes that process easier. But on verticalization and of course our thinking is continuously evolving. I think since we last publicly sort of discussed our focus areas, you know, our thinking has evolved. But I think on verticalization, you know, the most critical factor is really the data and the models don't work well if your data quality is low. And a very good example of that is really in the field of, you know, computational biology. I think why breakthroughs? I mean, certainly there have been incredible breakthroughs like alpha fold, but but you know, outside of that, when you compare it to breakthroughs and, you know, legal or, or other services or other sectors rather, you know, the, the breakthroughs have come in slower and that's because they're still sort of there's not enough data on on sort of, you know, biology and genomics that that's really high quality. So, so with verticalization, you know, when companies have their private data, right, it just made lens the models to, you know, produce better quality results. And so that's where we see a huge Moat. I think there's still a lot of room to invest and to innovate in the sort of machine learning operation space and sort of that middleware in facilitating better memory in doing agent orchestration and then also with explain ability. | The Hidden Problem with AI Models I think that's going to be a huge one that is going to really help these models be even more effective because today I think we're still trying to figure out how the models work. I think also tied to that is, you know, we, we need a lot more investment into sort of model evals and, and how we can make them consistent with, with with reality so that they're not just optimizing for, you know, specific use cases, but really are generalizable. | Why Investors Are Betting on World Models Are you investing in those kinds of companies actively? Speaker 2 We are, we are, we're, you know, we, I, I put out a note on LinkedIn at the end of 2025 talking about what some of our focus areas are, but we're really interested by world models. So we just did an investment into a company called Odyssey, which is backed by NVIDIA folks like Jeff Dean. We talked about companies that are building in the edge compute space. You know, there's a lot of conversation about the overbuild of, you know, AI data centers, but we're seeing that, you know, that, you know, that there are other sort of physical places where you can do that on edge devices and space. | The AI Future Beyond Data Centers So, you know, we also look at look at those spaces. Speaker 1 That's incredible because there is, you know, such a demand and, and growth of data centres, but a lot of concern about their energy usage and, and there have been delays in data centre build out because of the constraints in sometimes in the US for the electrical grid. | Edge Compute and AI in Space Do you believe that these maybe modular data centres or what's your what's your take on how we can reach the AI era beyond just data centers? Speaker 2 Increasingly, you know, I, I think it was, I can't remember if it was Android that put out an AI phone, right? But those computations are gonna be run locally, right? We already see edge compute happening in factories, right? Where you're not needing to, you know, use a data center. But they're really run locally. I think over the next few years we'll see compute being done on your phone. And then of course there are people who are building data centers in space like Star Cloud, which is a portfolio company of mine, not at Wild, but as a personal investment, really ambitious team, really trying to prove a technology, ambitious founders. And what's exciting about doing data centers in space is a couple of things, right? You know, you have access to, you know, the sun all the time. You don't need a battery. So there's a lot of pros, but there's also things that they need to figure out like, you know, constant maintenance of that, you know, low orbit satellite and the hardware that goes along with that. But why governments are interested in it is it plays very well into the sovereign AI theme. If you're a government that you know, is collecting data in a different country, how can you ensure that that data is not being hacked or leaked, you know, to that local to that locale, you can send it up in space and just, you know, process the compute there. | Why Countries Are Racing for Sovereign AI So there's a, there's actually quite a few advantages, you know, even outside of economics that where this could really make sense. And that's, I think, a very exciting space. Speaker 1 And Tala, you've spoken about sovereign AI and it's important. Could you explain what it is and why you consider it important? Speaker 2 Sovereign AI to me means, you know, having a strategy as a nation for how AI is, you know, both developed but also implemented in your country. And I don't think having true sovereign AI means owning every stock or, you know, every stage of the stock. I think we're going to continue to at least from this region to use NVIDIA chips, right? We're not going to make our own chips here for training and and post trading, you know, but I think it's really important that, you know, we do develop or fine tune existing models to our region. Because ultimately, you know, I think AI should be a technology that just gets embedded into our day-to-day lives. And without that like additional friction where it just becomes like, you know, your right hand where you're not really thinking about it, but it's just adding value. And so if it sort of becomes embedded and, you know, somewhat invisible to, you know, our consciousness, it's really important that we can trust this technology and trust that it encompasses our values, our social norms. And so it's really important that we define what those parameters are today, especially on a nation to nation level, so that it's not predefined by, you know, sort of other, other countries. Speaker 1 Which is why they're developing Arabic LLMS. Saudi and UAE have their own data centers. | What Students Should Study in the AI Era And certainly in Singapore, we also have the Sea Lion LLM, which is for Southeast Asian languages. And I was just talking to Jeff Dean and he was sitting on this podcast about that as well. Now, on the one hand, we there's a lot of excitement about AI and how it can solve diseases, have personalized tutors for people who unjustly have been left out of the education system. But on the other hand, there is a perhaps, you know, a legitimate fear of what it will do to the current state of jobs. And there is skepticism about whether they'll be able to find jobs in an AI era. So I would say if you are looking talking to an 18 year old and the mom or, yeah, the UAE or Jordan, and they're asking, you know what they should study, Tala, you have your finger on the pulse of the future. What would you tell them? Speaker 2 I think it's really important, and I've always believed this to be the case, not just in AI, but I've always strongly believed that educational institutions should be about philosophy, should be about learning really the social sciences and being places where critical thinking is pushed and promoted. What's going to be really critical for the future is the ability to think creatively and problem solve. And that only comes from being in environments that really push you to think beyond what's right in front of you. And I think that having a grounding in social sciences and, and, and topics like philosophy, although not exclusively economics is really, really critical. It's even better if you can combine it with different fields of discipline more, let's say scientific oriented fields. Because where the future is going is we need people who increasingly have a wide range of sort of, you know, exposure. Speaker 1 You know, in Singapore, and I totally agree with you, Tala. In Singapore, just in the newspaper today, there is headline news that we're going to make exams and justice wanting grades over time less aspirational and make it much more about having diversity, for example. And this is a change in every education system across the world that we're seeing with the realization that the old way of doing things did not necessarily will not lead to the economic results that jobs that these children will grow into. | Why Future Startups Will Have Tiny Teams What about coming back to investing? And, you know, now people say, and we just had Mark Zuckerberg in his earnings call say that, you know, the teams are flattening and one person can do the the job of the whole team. And then some people say you're going to have one person Unicorn founders. What have you found when you see these like really smart, successful startup founders and their teams? Are they very small teams now? Are they tiny teams? Speaker 2 When you introduce more and more people, actually more of your time is dedicated to running a bureaucracy and managing process as opposed to really thinking about problems. When I look at founders, I think that, you know, really, really highly skilled, you know, talent is going to continue to be sparse. And I think that it's always, you know, the rule is always better to be surrounded by A players rather than a ton of B players. Obviously it depends business to business, right? Like Amazon's e-commerce business can't function without people whose work is really focused on execution. And they can only grow really with more people who are delivering things. You know, obviously they'll be autonomy, but I think we'll always like that business will always require more people as it grows. Could be wrong, but but I think, you know, when I look at founders today, there's definitely a, you know, there's definitely a competition for talent. And when I, you know, I was just talking to a founder last night and I think that, you know, increasingly I think that the smaller team is, is sort of like sort of planning for a smaller team is, is, is really the where like founders are at right now and like based on, you know, the conversations that I have with, with them. | The Real Problem Holding Women Founders Back That's really interesting. And what about women? I don't see enough women founders. You know, Raquel just raised I think a billion dollars, I believe with Bobby and which is this autonomous trucking software. And it is incredible. It's the biggest race from Canada. And we had Fei Fei Lee, who raised for her world AI. But still, I would say it's far from 5050. Is this going to change? Will we see more young women becoming founders? And if so, why would that be? Speaker 2 There are a lot of stories of women who are founding businesses who unfortunately don't catch mainstream attention. What's really interesting is, you know, when you look at the pipeline of talent, right, and specifically when you look at the GCC, the Gulf Corporation Council countries here in the Gulf, women, more women graduate from STEM degrees than men. Speaker 1 Really. Speaker 2 And Oh yeah, I think the difference is that we just have lower female participation rates. And I think, you know, that talent, I think just needs mentorship. 2 They need support getting into the right circles, talking to the right people to get funded. And you know, this, I tell my founders this who are based outside of Silicon Valley, I'm like, you need to spend time in Silicon Valley. You're a top talent, you need to go there and maybe you can come back later, but you've got to be there. | Will Big AI Kill Most Startups? You'll be missing out if you're not. And so I think this is where, you know, this is where Wild really wants to be helpful to all its founders, not just female founders. But I think This is why we haven't perhaps seen as many women in the AI space. Speaker 1 And one of the interesting things is that whether you're a man or a woman and you start a company and literally like a month later or six months later, there's an update to Gemini and it can do that and better. So I literally have stopped using, no joke, a couple of software as a service platforms because I can now just use Gemini or Clod. I used to for this very podcast. There are some platforms which will give you all the analytics. Now I just download it and upload it and it gives me a dashboard. Clod can even build a dashboard for me live that I can show my sponsors. Do you think that a number of these companies will just fail because the big ones will have the AI that can that can just do more and more and more of these SAS type needs that we have? Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that's the question. And I think This is why we are also being very mindful and thoughtful when we're investing in applications. And this is what's driven us to focus on the verticalization of applications because data is emote and if those large language models, you know, and other post transformer models don't have that data, then you know, there is definitely a use case. But I agree with you, I think that you know, they have, you know, from a coding perspective, CX perspective have just overtaken the market. I think the one area where there's still room for applications to run is for on Prem solutions for dealing with sensitive data and sensitive sectors, whether it's defense, healthcare, financial services. And so that's why we still are sort of in the market for those sorts of applications. But I couldn't agree with you more. Speaker 1 I think there's another place direct to consumer is one with direct to enterprise. When you have big enterprise clients like you said defense for example, the trusted relationship that you have with the engineers will take your data, right. So either you have your own proprietary data that you've gotten or or developed or or what have you and then you are helping a big enterprise with its data that still has some demand because they haven't unlocked it yet. But I think for a lot of the consumer facing applications, I see it all the time, even on LinkedIn, people have like, we're not using this CRM anymore. We just had like about vibe coded it. I went to dinner with my kids and my husband. I came back, my entire education technology platform that I was talking to you about was built by Lovable, at least the entire like CX, everything. It was good. And then I got my AI engineer. Now he's putting some AI and he's looking at the cybersecurity, but I'm using one person as opposed to a team of like, let's say 6 plus another three months to like to refine the prototype. It moves so fast now. So then the question is, what's the value that you're providing on top of it? And it's, it's tough, I think to, to really find that sweet spot. Speaker 2 Totally. I mean, I, you know, same founder I was talking to last night. He was like, Tyler, listen, just use my application because he's like internally like he runs a company of maybe 100 people, most of whom are engineers. And he was like Tella, I don't have a legal counsel. I actually just asked my model like what to do. And he's like, you should use my application. | Could AI Replace Venture Capitalists? You don't need your, your lawyer. You and I can be lawyers. We can be developers. We can be all sorts of things that just, you know, it's, we're just limited by our imagination. Speaker 1 One of the things that's I suppose interesting is tell me what you feel about this. They're saying that VCs are also possibly capable of being replaced by great AI that helps family offices and sovereign wealth funds make good decisions and venture capital. Speaker 2 If the AI can provide more value than the VCs, then we need to think about what is our purpose and where we can add value in that world that it the onus is on us to maybe defend us a little bit. You know, VC has always been a people business and to date it, you know, I don't think AI is capable of forming, you know, that that human touch and human connection of being able to read people. 50% of the decision that we make is really, really on the founders. And I don't think today where the technology is, really can tell you whether this founder is gonna make it all the way. They can give you factual details, but the soft stuff that we look for as well is not yet something that the AI can do really well, in my humble opinion. So I think we'll still have a job. But you know, even if we don't even, you know, I will be the first person to say, hey, you know what? AI is doing a better job. We need to really think about where we're adding value. Speaker 1 So Kyla, I love that. That's exactly my attitude. Also, you know, I have an AI engineering firm, I have hundreds of AI engineers and my team, I have a new media education business. But you know, once you just embrace the mindset that as it gets better, then we'll add value on top of it. You know, then, then that's your game. Your game is to add, to be useful on top of the AI. And and so that that is, it may be daunting, but at least it's not like depressing, which is I find people, unless they find the hope, the light at the end of the tunnel, they need to get some skills and then they can get excited about what they can build on top. The other thing that I agree with you is that human relationships, because that's what I meant with enterprise, that trusted relationship and that human intuitiveness, that gut. | What Keeps Tala Al-Jabri Up at Night And who knows, AI might have it, but it certainly doesn't at the moment. Tala, you're very unique. I mean, when we met in Singapore that evening and then I found out you were the, you had started the first AI native Bond. You were a Saudi VC, a woman who was, you know, had so many accolades and is tapping into the brightest minds globally and connecting Silicon Valley and the Middle East. It's highly unusual and very inspiring. Now I really hope that you'll come to Singapore again and we'll keep in touch. Speaker 2 Aisha, I'd love nothing more. You are so incredibly inspiring. I absolutely love your podcast. I love what you're doing, and I cannot wait to host you in the Kingdom and in this part of the world. | Final Takeaways from the AI Frontier It would just be a pleasure. Speaker 1 Thank you so much for joining AI Cross Borders. Speaker 2 Thank you, Aisha. It's my pleasure. Speaker 1 Here's what I keep thinking about from this conversation. Tala talked about being uncomfortable about choosing purpose because that's where growth happens. At 25, she didn't wait for permission at every stage. She built the thing that didn't exist yet. And now, at this moment, when everyone's asking what happens next with AI, she's not waiting. She's building the bridge between Silicon Valley and the Gulf, backing the founders who see what others can't. If you're sitting there wondering whether you're ready to make the leap, whether it's starting something, investing in something, or just betting on yourself, maybe you'll get the answer today. 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