Waseem Afzal
Group Founder and CEO, FAST

FAST founder on why a tech company that happens to be marketing- first builds the tools before the campaigns, what happens to media buying when the search bar becomes a chat window, and why MENA should be a market AI ships from, not just to.

BB: You position FAST as a tech company that happens to be marketing first, not a marketing company that’s bolted on some tech. What does that distinction actually mean in practice?

WA: It means the product roadmap drives the client roadmap, not the other way around. A marketing company with tech bolted on builds campaigns first and reaches for tools to execute them. We build the tools first: our outcomes ad product, retail media network, creator infrastructure and measurement stack. What clients buy, including Ads Inside Intelligence, is what those products produce, not a separate layer sitting on top.

It also comes down to how we are built. FAST was set up in 2023, so we carry none of the legacy tech debt or legacy organisation structure that comes from having grown up in a media buying era. When the market shifts, we are not unwinding anything first. We just move. That is the practical difference between calling yourself tech enabled and actually being a tech company.

BB:What’s the clearest evidence that the transition is real, not just internal language?

WA: Ads Inside Intelligence. We launched it in September, and it does something that did not exist as a purchasable product in this region before then. It measures how often a brand gets mentioned inside ChatGPT’s answers, then lets you buy placement alongside those answers, with measurement and media buying in one dashboard, built for LLM surfaces rather than search or social.

We went live across eleven MENA markets the day OpenAI opened them to advertisers, and we ran it on ourselves first before offering it to clients. That is the proof point I would point to. It is not a feature bolted onto a media plan. It is a category that did not exist, and MENA brands can buy into it before most Western markets have equivalent tooling live.

BB: Where’s the biggest gap between how AI in advertising is discussed publicly in this region and how it’s actually being deployed?

WA: The public conversation is still stuck on generative content: logos, copy, video. That is the least interesting part of what is happening. The real deployment gap sits in the infrastructure layer of measurement, attribution and buying, which is where the money actually moves.

A lot of companies in the region are embedding AI tools onto legacy campaign workflows: same funnel, same reporting cadence, faster copywriting. Almost nobody is rebuilding the buying and measurement stack itself around how Arab consumers now discover brands, through AI answers and creators as well as search results and paid social.

That is the gap. Everyone is talking about AI making creative faster, and almost nobody is asking what happens to media buying when the search bar becomes a chat window.

BB: What’s a lesson from leading a group through this kind of transformation that other regional tech leaders tend to underestimate?

WA: The hardest part is not the technology, it is sequencing belief. You cannot mandate AI native thinking into several different business units at once and expect uniform conviction. Some teams will treat it as a threat to their existing revenue lines before they see it as an opportunity.

What worked for us was running a pilot playbook of over two dozen concrete use cases across development, marketing and internal agent workflows, and letting the teams that moved fastest become the internal proof point for the teams that had not yet.

BB: Looking at MENA’s broader technology and innovation sector, what shift do you expect to matter most over the next two to three years?

WA: Right now, MENA governments’ investment in AI makes this region a prime target for global AI companies to ship their solutions into, a distribution market for someone else’s product. We think that is backwards, and it is the opposite of what we are building toward. We want to ship from MENA to global: build the product here, prove it here first, then take it outward.

MATTE AI Studio, our paid media AI agents product, is an early example. It is built for this region’s market access and designed from day one to extend to global markets.

The shift I expect to matter most is exactly that: MENA moving from a market AI gets shipped to, to a market AI gets shipped from.

BB: FAST builds tools specifically for SMBs. From an entrepreneurial lens, what’s actually holding smaller regional businesses back from adopting AI at the pace enterprises are?

WA: Not awareness, and not even cost. Almost every AI tool on the market is still designed for a team that already has a martech stack, a data function and someone whose job is to manage tools. SMBs do not have that layer, and enterprise shaped AI products do not work when there is no team to run them.

That is where we see the real opportunity: AI as a force multiplier for the SMB ecosystem specifically. Every service across our portfolio now operates as a product, not a managed service, powered by AI in a way that makes adoption close to seamless, because the complexity lives in the product, not in the client’s team.

Enterprise AI adoption is a resourcing problem. SMB AI adoption is a design problem, and building products instead of tools is how we are solving it.