The Chief AI Officer function · retained
Someone has to own AI in your company. We take the seat.
Encodly runs the Chief AI Officer function for companies across the UAE — setting the adoption plan, deploying AI inside daily operations, enabling your teams, and reporting every month on what it actually returned. Arabic-first, at whatever stage you're starting from, without adding headcount.
UAE
From 4h down to 6min
From 4h down to 6min
Vendor invoice reconciliation — a result from our prior production work. Your report will carry your numbers.
00
The problem
AI is nobody's actual job.
Some companies haven't started. Some bought the licenses, ran the training, and watched the four-hour task still take four hours. Some have six tools running that nobody can name the total cost of. Different symptoms, one cause: AI sits on top of everyone's real work, so it moves only when someone finds a spare afternoon. No plan, no owner, and no number at the end of the month — and it lands, eventually, on the desk of whoever runs the company.
01
The engagement
Start with a week. Continue with the seat.
Start here
1 week · fixed fee
The AI Operating Plan
One week inside your business. We score all six pillars with your department heads, map the processes that actually consume time, and hand you a ranked list of what's worth automating — with the hours and the dirhams attached to each one.
You keep the plan whether or not we go further. Most clients continue on a retainer; you're under no obligation to.
Start with the Operating Plan- 01The 30-question readiness scorecard, scored live with your department heads — not self-assessed.
- 02A process map of where the week actually goes, department by department.
- 03A ranked automation backlog, each item costed in hours and dirhams.
- 04A prioritised 90-day plan, and a readout session to walk your leadership through it.
And if you'd rather someone owned it
Your Chief AI Officer
Monthly · the core engagement
One senior owner takes the AI seat in your business: the plan, the deployment, your team's adoption, and the numbers underneath all three. They sit in your leadership meetings, hold the roadmap and answer for it — for a fraction of what the title costs as a salary, ending whenever you say so.
Tell us what you're dealing with01
Quarterly
Set the plan
A written adoption roadmap: what to build, what to buy, what to fix, and what to shut down — sequenced by impact, costed, and re-cut every quarter as the business moves.
02
Sprints
Deploy into operations
Workflows rebuilt as running systems inside the tools you already use, handed over live. Not pilots parked beside the real work, waiting for someone to adopt them.
03
Rolling
Enable the teams
Training runs against the systems we deployed in your business, in Arabic, department by department — until the people who did the work by hand are the ones running it.
04
Monthly
Measure usage and impact
A monthly report: who is actually using what, hours returned, spend against saving, and what stalled. The readiness score is re-cut every 90 days, so progress is a number rather than an impression.
02
Why Encodly
Accountable, not advisory.
01
One owner, by name
A named senior engineer holds the seat and sits in your leadership meetings, answerable for the plan, the systems and the numbers. Not a deck, and not a bench of juniors rotating through.
02
A function, not a hire
A Chief AI Officer is a salary, a six-month search, and a year before anything ships. This is the same seat, filled next month, at a fraction of the cost — and endable at a month's notice.
03
Arabic-first delivery
Planned, built, documented, taught and reported in Gulf business Arabic — not translated after the fact.
04
Measured monthly
Hours returned, adoption by department, and spend against saving — reported every month and re-scored every 90 days. A number you can weigh against payroll, not certificates issued.
05
Off-the-shelf first
When an existing product already does the job, we recommend it and set it up — even when a custom build would bill more. Bespoke is reserved for what the market doesn't sell.
06
Retrain, don't replace
Nobody learns features in a classroom and then goes back to the old way — enablement runs against live systems. The people who know the manual work best end up running the automations, so the institutional knowledge stays and only the repetitive work goes.
03
The scorecard
Readiness is a number.
Six questions, one per weighted pillar, scored 1 to 5 — about two minutes, whatever stage you're at. Your score doesn't decide whether there's a plan; it decides what the plan is, starting with your two weakest pillars.
Score yourself- 01Strategy & Leadership15%
- 02Data20%
- 03People & Skills20%
- 04Processes20%
- 05Tools & Technology15%
- 06Governance & Security10%
6 pillars · 6 questions · weighted score /100
04
Proof
What a monthly report looks like.
Representative results from a decade shipping production systems — before Encodly carried the name. Under a retainer, these lines are your numbers.
Vendor invoice reconciliation
40-person distribution business, Dubai
Every invoice matched against the ERP automatically; the cycle now opens with the exceptions rather than ending on them.
The clerk who used to key the cycle in now owns the exception queue and the supplier ledger — the judgment half of the job, which was always the part worth paying for.
From 4h down to 6min
From 4h down to 6min
- ~90 invoices a month
- Built in 11 days
New-hire onboarding packet
Assembled from the HR system and SharePoint, ready for review instead of built from a blank folder.
From 2d down to 15min
From 2d down to 15min
05
Security & data
Built to sit inside your controls.
Where does our data live?
In your environment. Systems run against your existing tenancy and storage. What leaves is only what a request carries — the same arrangement you already have with the cloud vendors holding your mail and your files.
How do you build safely?
Least privilege first. Your admins enable each connection, not individual staff, and it starts read-only — write access comes once the workflow is proven against a copy.
Who controls access?
You do. Admin controls and scoped permissions are set with your IT team from day one. Audit logging follows the plan tier — we tell you what yours includes before you buy the seats.
Where does inference run?
Outside the UAE, and we say so upfront. The model does not learn from your business: nothing you send is used to train it. Your content goes to one provider under contract and the conversation stays in your workspace under your admins — the same relationship you already have with the vendors holding your mail and your files. A few models can run in-country on reserved capacity; most cannot, and where the law requires it we use one of those instead.
Regional compliance?
Engagements are mapped against UAE data-protection law from day one, and running systems get recurring security reviews — not a single check at handover.
Enterprise options?
Managed device policy, access brokered through your identity provider, region-restricted processing and self-hosted models — scoped to what your tier and provider actually allow.
The long answer — which statutes put you in the in-country category, and how we tell you which one you're in — is in the Privacy Policy.
06
The company
In the operator's chair, not the advisor's.
Encodly runs the Chief AI Officer function for owner-led companies across the UAE — the plan, the deployment, the enablement and the measurement, owned end to end by us. Engineering-led, in Arabic and English, and reported in hours returned rather than slides delivered.
Under 25 people the work has a different shape: fewer systems, no IT function, and the owner is also the operator. So the plan gets smaller, not lighter — two or three processes automated properly, chosen because they're the ones eating your evenings. Not a transformation program nobody has time to run.
Deliberately small — six clients at a time, so the person who scoped your work is the person who builds it. Every engagement is run by the senior who took the seat; you will not be handed to a junior after signing.
- 10+ yrs
- shipping production systems for enterprise teams
- AR · EN
- native, first-class bilingual delivery
- Any stage
- from no AI at all to a live stack that needs order
- In-region
- data residency and private deployment available
07
Contact
Someone should own this. Let's talk about who.
45-minute working session
We'll map one process end to end, put a number on what it currently costs, and identify whether it's worth automating. You'll leave with at least one thing you can act on whether or not we work together.
No calendar link on this page — deliberately. Tell us what you're actually dealing with and we'll reply by email, usually the same day. If it looks like a fit, we'll send times.
Score your readiness first