Raghda Ibraheem: AI is moving off the screen and into the room, with digital employees that can speak, listen and respond to people in physical places. In Saudi Arabia, the question is no longer how much to invest in AI, but how to make it work in practice, in Arabic and on local infrastructure. Napster, which now builds embodied AI agents, set up a Saudi entity earlier this year and partnered with HUMAIN on Arabic-native AI. Joining me to talk all about it on Zoom now is Frank Furnari, general manager for Saudi Arabia and senior vice president at Napster. Frank, welcome to the show. So, Frank, AI is moving beyond text on a screen. Let’s explain first to people what an embodied AI agent actually means.
Frank Furnari: Thank you for inviting me. Yes, you are right. AI is leaving the chat box and stepping into places where people already go for help or for work or for study. Think about front desks or visitor centers, the office or universities. For the past few years, most people met AI as text on the screen. Human-like AI instead gives a face, a voice, a persona and a place to AI. So now people can walk up, speak naturally and get answers face to face from these video agents on the screen, on the physical AI. And many people will never type a question in the chat box, right? Because they will speak to someone who looks at them and answers, and have this kind of conversation, [unclear: “co-working”] or for studying or simply to do research. In this region, where service is personal and spoken primarily, presence and voice are more important than text, if you wish.
Raghda Ibraheem: Now, Napster has set up a legal entity in Saudi Arabia. Why did you decide to build locally, especially in Saudi?
Frank Furnari: Well, we didn’t come to sell into Saudi Arabia from abroad. As you said, we set up a company. We built the legal entity here with local partners, with local talent. This year, thanks also to the help from the Ministry of Investment, we set up the company and our strategy in Saudi Arabia. It followed three key pillars. The first one is to have a local presence, so not only from a legal point of view, but actually people on the ground, developing that talent on the ground. The second pillar is hosting all our amazing AI tech stack in the kingdom, so we have data sovereignty inside the kingdom, so no data or interaction leaves the country. And the third pillar is to have an Arabic-native AI. This is one of the key things that we have done, as you mentioned, with HUMAIN. Our partnership with HUMAIN is to have this Arabic-native, AI-first experience for businesses.
Raghda Ibraheem: And I want to ask you about that. The partnership that you have with HUMAIN, now Saudi Arabia’s national artificial intelligence champion, you can say, at the moment you partner to bring Arabic-native AI to organizations. Now, what does that mean exactly, beyond translation and beyond the normal models that we know?
Frank Furnari: If you think about what you can find right now in the market, it’s primarily Arabic translation into English or vice versa. When AI is built in English, it doesn’t translate properly. So it’s not about just translation, as you said, but also about that cultural element, thinking Arabic first. We have integrated our tech stack with the HUMAIN tech stack, which they built, this amazing LLM called ALLaM, which is built around [unclear: “their apiculture”], but also the human voice, which is these Arabic-speaking dialects, Arabic-speaking elements, into the platform. So we are not about just translating or talking in Arabic. We’re actually thinking deeply in Arabic and having this [unclear: “co-working”] conversation together with AI systems that are Arabic-first.
Raghda Ibraheem: Yeah, because I think we still have a gap in that specialty, especially in the Arabic language in general. Now, your first live customer deployment in Saudi Arabia was a charitable association for orphan care in Mecca, using an agent called Sanad. Now, what does Sanad do exactly?
Frank Furnari: Well, Sanad means “support” in Arabic, and that’s what it actually does. It’s an agent that helps and supports people to care about orphans and their families. Sanad lives in a physical space, because it’s within our AI physical kiosk. So people can now walk toward the kiosk and get Sanad, which can answer any questions that they may have around [unclear: “Katine”], which is the charitable association for orphan care in Mecca, gather more information about their programs, and potentially also help them and explain how they can contribute to the charity, to those people, essentially. It’s not a pilot, it’s a live deployment, physical AI in Mecca, and it’s always available 24/7 to people. It also talks multiple languages, right? So not only Arabic, but it can talk more than 70 languages in real time. So this is one of the examples that we are here not just to make a transactional engagement, but actually to have an impact on society. And this client is one that we really care about in the kingdom.
Raghda Ibraheem: Yeah. Thank you so much for being here with us today and giving us an inside look at AI in Saudi especially. Thank you so much.
Frank Furnari: Thank you for having me.
