As we leave 2024 behind, I found myself reflecting over the holidays on a transformative year that reshaped my grasp of technology's role in human connection. It's been a year where artificial intelligence moved from potential to practical impact, and where personal growth intertwined with professional evolution in unexpected ways, and deep gratitude for the friends and connections I made along the way.

Embracing Visibility in a Digital Age

The year began with a personal challenge: stepping out of my comfort zone as a naturally private person into more public engagement. As an engineer, I've always let my work speak for itself. But 2024 taught me that impact often requires visibility — not for its own sake, but as a catalyst for meaningful connection.

My journey into more active social media presence, particularly on X and Linkedin, brought surprising life lessons. What started as an exercise in digital presence evolved into genuine connections, some of which had minimal impact, while others changed my trajectory in unforeseen but positive ways for which I am deeply grateful. Even gaining some unexpected high-profile followers along the way taught me something valuable about maintaining authenticity in the digital age.

Innovation at Scale

2024 marked significant milestones in bringing artificial intelligence to real-world applications. At Blue Yonder, where I found myself working with some of the brightest people I met, our work in GenAI engineering has focused on transforming supply chain and logistics — areas where AI's impact extends far beyond efficiency to reshape how global commerce functions. Leading these initiatives has deepened my appreciation for AI's potential to solve complex, real-world challenges in dynamically evolving environments, and I am looking forward to see how the global chain of logistics ends up benefitting from our work and all the challenges we will alleviate.

The year also saw Omneity Labs, my initiative to kick-off Gen AI R&D for low-resource languages, take its Gen AI API platform from development to deployment, now serving real applications in production in languages traditionally ignored by Big Tech. The platform offers multilingual LLMs, embeddings, translation, transliteration and other specialized models that are the result of the research I have been conducting in enabling AI for Moroccan Arabic and other languages.

On another front, Monitoro, my project aiming to make your browser automatable without coding skills, is evolving and gaining agentic capabilities, representing another step in making AI more accessible, practical and immediately useful. These developments reflect my broader interest in AI systems that augment and enhance human capabilities rather than replace them, a topic close to my heart and which I want to write more about this year, hopefully.

Contributing to Morocco's Tech Renaissance

My engagement with Morocco's tech and academic ecosystem has been particularly meaningful this year. Presenting at the International Moroccan Arabic Conference led to fascinating discussions about AI's role in linguistics and cultural preservation, culminating in research that will soon be published, in my first-ever academic foray.

Visiting institutions like 1337 Coding School, UM6P, and Lydex revealed an inspiring picture of Morocco's tech future. The energy at 1337 particularly resonated with me — here was the learning environment I wished for as a technology-obsessed kid in Morocco. Seeing students thrive in an environment that encourages discovery and self-directed learning showed me how far Morocco's tech education has evolved and how competitive it is poised to become.

Participation in events like ThinkAI, GITEX, Rencontre des Entrepreneurs Francophones, and TIM'24 wasn't just about sharing knowledge—it was about witnessing and contributing to a growing ecosystem of innovation in the region. Each interaction reinforced my belief in technology's power to bridge cultural and geographical gaps while preserving what makes each community unique, at the same time getting to meet great people along the way and uncovering more of the incredible creative energy and the contagious optimism I had the chance to witness.

The AI Convergence

As we look toward 2025, I'm struck by how various threads of my work and interests are converging around artificial intelligence's role in serving human needs. The supply chain innovations I'm part of developing, the expanding capabilities of generative AI for low-resource languages, and the evolution of agentic systems all point toward a future where technology amplifies human potential rather than replacing it, in a way that preserves our cultural diversity and specificities.

Whether it's making supply chains more resilient, enabling new forms of human-AI interaction, or contributing to educational innovations, the common thread is using AI to solve meaningful problems. Multi-year initiatives I started a long time ago are materializing in ways that reinforce my conviction about AI's potential for positive impact.

Looking Forward

As 2025 approaches, I'm energized by the possibilities ahead. The boundaries between different applications of AI are blurring, creating opportunities for innovation that serves genuine human needs. From my vantage point at the intersection of enterprise AI, research, and entrepreneurship, I see tremendous potential for technology to enhance human capability and connection, and I aim to make further contributions on a technological level as well as sharing more knowledge and thought-leadership.

The journey continues, and I'm grateful for the community that makes it possible—the brilliant minds I work with, the emerging talents I meet, and everyone who engages with and contributes to these initiatives. Together, we're not just advancing technology; we're shaping how it serves humanity's greater needs and establishing the groundwork for a future inclusive of all.

The year ahead promises to be pivotal for AI's evolution, and I'm committed to be on the frontline. Here's to 2025 and the possibilities it brings.