What’s in this episode?

In this episode of GCC Tech Talks, Tom Stroud and Sye Rahman sit down with Sumit Srivastava, a transformation leader who’s spent decades across Silicon Valley, Canada, and beyond  and recently returned home to Dubai.

We unpack the GCC’s pace of execution, the AI data center boom (and whether some of it becomes “dead investment”), and the real tension leaders face between speed, governance, and ROI.

We cover:

• Why the UAE is accelerating from vision to execution

• Data centers: compute vs storage, ROI, sustainability, and demand

• The “risk of inaction” (and why many organisations under-model it)

• Why innovation must be a living system, not a one-off project

• How to deliver value in small, measurable steps

• Omnichannel, data-driven customer journeys, and AI-powered personalisation

• What’s next: conversational commerce, agents, and customer-owned data

Listen to the full episode about debate about the GCC’s big bet on AI infrastructure, and the hard trade-offs leaders face between innovation speed, governance, and ROI.