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How does Kareem approach AI integration across its business?
Kareem designated 2019 as its internal "Year of AI" — well before the current wave of AI hype — embedding the technology directly into its ride-hailing demand prediction and dispatching algorithms. Today, Nourhan Farhat organizes Kareem's AI efforts into three distinct buckets: boosting colleague and company productivity, embedding AI into products, and reimagining what the super app itself could look like in a conversational AI world.
2019: Kareem Commits to AI Before It Was Mainstream
Kareem's AI commitment didn't start with the launch of ChatGPT or the recent explosion of generative tools. The company formally declared 2019 its "Year of AI," making it an internal strategic priority at a time when most companies were still treating AI as a research curiosity.
The first applications were operational and concrete: AI was embedded into core ride-hailing infrastructure — specifically demand prediction and dispatching algorithms. These are not marginal features. They directly determine how efficiently Kareem matches riders and captains across markets like Dubai and Saudi Arabia. As Farhat explains in Beyond the Deck, this early commitment set the foundation for everything that followed.
Three Buckets: How Farhat Structures Kareem's AI Agenda Today
Farhat frames Kareem's current AI work around three clear priorities. The first is internal productivity — using AI to make colleagues and the company itself more efficient. The second is product embedding — integrating AI visibly into the user experience. One concrete example she shares in this episode: a grocery list feature that takes a photo of a handwritten list and converts it directly into a delivered order.
The third bucket is the most forward-looking. Farhat pushes the question of what the super app itself should look like in a conversational AI world — not just adding AI on top of existing flows, but rethinking the interface and user journey from scratch. This is strategic thinking, not feature shipping, and it reflects Kareem's longer-term positioning as explored throughout Beyond the Deck.
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Strategies could be great on paper, but unless you really fix the operating model, the incentives, the entire culture of the company, the values of the company, I think that's the make it or break it."
Nourhan Farhat — VP of People, Strategy and Ventures, Kareem.
Farhat spent 10 years in management consulting before joining Kareem, including time at Roland Berger — the firm she credits with first introducing her to the consulting world. She joined Kareem as Head of Corporate Strategy and Chief of Staff, later expanding her role to cover People and Ventures. She describes the move from consulting to the corporate world as driven by a desire to own deliverables and hold real P&L responsibility. Her AI framework at Kareem reflects that same operator's mindset: structured, accountable, and tied directly to business outcomes.
The grocery list feature is a useful illustration of how Farhat thinks about AI product integration. It doesn't just add a chatbot layer — it removes friction from a specific user task entirely. Kareem's super app ambition, which spans ride-hailing, food delivery, and grocery delivery, gives it the surface area to deploy AI across many touchpoints simultaneously. That breadth — discussed in more depth in the full episode — is part of what makes the conversational AI rethink strategically significant.
See also
What is Kareem's founding purpose and how is it expressed operationally?
When co-founders Mudassir Sheikha and Magnus Olsson started Kareem in 2012, their stated purpose was to simplify and improve the lives of people — and to build an awesome organization in the process.
Why haven't super apps taken off in the US or Europe the way they have in the Middle East or China?
Farhat points to three structural barriers in Western markets: antitrust and competition laws make it harder to consolidate services under one platform, the infrastructure is configured differently, and consumer habits are already locked into separate, established apps.
What is Kareem's super app model and why does it work in the Middle East?
Kareem's super app consolidates ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, and other services into a single app, unifying identity, payments, and the user experience across all of them.
Key takeaways
- Kareem declared 2019 its "Year of AI" — years before the current wave — embedding it first into demand prediction and dispatching systems.
- Farhat structures AI initiatives into three buckets: internal productivity, product embedding, and reimagining the super app for a conversational AI era.
- The grocery list feature — photo of a handwritten list converted into a delivered order — illustrates how AI removes friction at the product level.
- The third bucket (conversational AI rethink of the super app) signals that Kareem is treating AI as a structural opportunity, not just an efficiency tool.
Nourhan Farhat's full breakdown of Kareem's AI strategy — and the super app vision behind it — is in the episode.
Listen to the episode on Listenly