Man on a Mission: HE Faisal Al Bannai

By Aby Sam Thomas

HE Faisal Al Bannai is perhaps best known today as the secretary general of the UAE’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) – but that isn’t his only claim to fame.

Before he was appointed to lead ATRC (which, by the way, was established to transform the UAE’s capital, Abu Dhabi, into “a world-leading research center and a destination for global talent in advanced technology,”) Al Bannai had already had a career as both a successful tech entrepreneur and an astute businessman.

Al Bannai’s innings in this arena began when he founded Axiom Telecom in the UAE in 1997, which grew to become a US$2.5 billion business that’s now one of the GCC region’s largest distributors of some of the world’s most recognizable brands in mobile phones and accessories. In 2014, Al Bannai went on to prove his mettle as an entrepreneur a second time around, when he launched global cybersecurity service provider DarkMatter in the UAE and led it to become a $400 million enterprise.

Then, in 2019, when the UAE established the advanced technology group, EDGE, Al Bannai was picked to lead this new entity as its managing director and CEO. EDGE, which was launched with the aim to “develop agile, bold, and disruptive solutions for defense and beyond,” had Al Bannai overseeing the Abu Dhabi-headquartered enterprise’s development and growth as it consolidated more than 25 different entities into its current key operating clusters. Al Bannai has since moved on to become the chairman of the board of directors at EDGE, and he was appointed to his current position at ATRC when the UAE launched the entity in 2020.

Given that this role follows what has already been a storied career trajectory for Al Bannai, one can’t help but wonder about his personal drivers for the work he does. To answer that, the Emirati national points toward ATRC’s founding purpose, which, as its website states, is to establish a vibrant research and development ecosystem that positions Abu Dhabi and the wider UAE as a key technology player on the world stage, and to support the country’s transformation into a knowledge-based economy.

“This is a mission, and frankly, that’s what’s driving me,” Al Bannai says. “It is in knowing that if we are successful, then we’ll have contributed to moving the needle of a nation – and if we can contribute even just one percent to moving that needle, then it’s good enough [for us].”

HE Faisal Al Bannai.

To understand the significance of the work that ATRC is doing, Al Bannai suggests looking at it from the prism of what he lists are the entity’s three key objectives. The first of these, he shares, is to create in Abu Dhabi and the UAE a magnet and a destination for advanced technology talent. Here, Al Bannai acknowledges the key challenge in realizing this goal, which is that while the UAE has made its name known in domains like trade and business, it hasn’t traditionally been known as a hub for advanced technology research.

However, the UAE has other factors going for it – one of which is the fact that 85 percent of the nation’s population hail from other parts of the world, and that they are quite happy to be living in harmony here. “Some might see it as a disadvantage, but we see the UAE demographic as an advantage,” Al Bannai says. “So, we said, let’s leverage the DNA of the UAE, which is that it is a cosmopolitan country that’s open to everyone – let’s use it to bring in talent from all around the world, create a critical mass destination for advanced technology research, and make it so that they can see themselves live here and grow here.”

To facilitate this, Al Bannai points out that the UAE leadership made an important decision with respect to how ATRC and its research centers were set up, which is in stark contrast to how it would have been approached by similar government-driven undertakings around the world. “Normally, government centers are supposed to accompany a nation’s research centers, and they’re usually 90-95 percent the nationality of that country,” Al Bannai explains. “Here, the UAE said no; we will welcome everyone to come in, and the research centers will never be nationalized. So, you’re not coming in temporarily – many of those who have come in have already been granted golden visas, or even citizenship in certain cases. And all of this is to show that we’re really building something unique here when it comes to talent.”

ATRC’s second objective, Al Bannai continues, is to help build a knowledge economy in the UAE to deliver solutions to problems actively faced by the world in six priority sectors: aerospace and space; food and agriculture; healthcare; safety and security; transport; sustainability, environment, and energy. “This means that the research that we do needs to solve a current problem in the world,” Al Bannai adds. “So, it should solve either a client’s problem, a company’s problem, or a country’s problem – it needs to solve a problem.”

Again, there’s a clear reason governing ATRC’s laser-eyed focus on research that’s built on actual problem statements. While not every research project that ATRC undertakes can be expected to be successful, Al Bannai points out that the ones that do – thanks to this overarching solutions-focused mandate – can be expected to generate some kind of economic return. So, what ATRC does is not research for the sake of research – it’s research that will deliver solutions that will lead to actual economic impact.

Such an ethos also lends well to the realization of what Al Bannai lists as ATRC’s final objective, which is to build a research ecosystem in the UAE that’s also connected to the rest of the world. From a local perspective, ATRC has made sure to ally itself with everyone from the country’s leading universities to cross-sector industry stakeholders to facilitate this ecosystem, and in May this year, it rolled out the UAE Research Map to act as a centralized resource portal for those interested in learning more about the state of the research and development (R&D) ecosystem in the country.

Meanwhile, looking beyond the UAE’s borders, ATRC has also managed to engineer research contracts with over 80 institutes from around the world, which has resulted in joint research being carried out in industries like biotechnology, quantum, and autonomous robotics. Given that this has happened in just four years since ATRC’s inception, Al Bannai has good reason to be proud of this achievement, stating, “I don’t believe there is any organization globally today with contracts connecting it to 80 universities around the world.”

HE Faisal Al Bannai at the World Governments Summit 2024.

Al Bannai’s explanation for the objectives that underline ATRC’s mandate also unpack what each of the three entities under its umbrella – ASPIRE, Technology Innovation Institute (TII), and VentureOne – have been tasked with. While ATRC keeps itself concerned with governance and policy creation, ASPIRE acts as its technology program management and business development arm – that’s the entity that goes to clients in the six pre-defined priority areas to seek out pain points that advanced technology could potentially solve.

Once ASPIRE builds a problem statement, it goes to TII – the applied research arm of ATRC – to find out how the 1,200 researchers it houses in its 10 different research centers could potentially solve it. Timelines are set, as are budgets, and a proposal is laid out for the aforementioned client to validate. Once it gets a go-ahead, ASPIRE takes care of the funding of the research at TII, but it remains the voice of the client there, ensuring that key performance indicators are met, or if, along the way, plans need to be rethought or revised.

Once TII’s researchers reach a milestone moment (remember, they are on the lookout for actual solutions to problems), that’s when VentureOne – the commercialization arm of ATRC – comes into play. VentureOne takes on the research breakthrough with the aim to productize it – this can happen either through a licensing model that’d allow a company to commercialize the solution at hand, or to spin out an offering as a startup on its own. In any case, this is when the economic impact stands to happen – of course, it helps that there’s a good chance that the client at the start of this process will also be the first customer.

ATRC has thus built a carefully crafted plan to realize its vision, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating – and there’s perhaps no better place to see this in action than in the entity’s moves within the field of one of the hottest technologies around – artificial intelligence (AI).

It was in March last year that TII revealed the Falcon large language model (LLM) it was building, and two months later, it announced that it was releasing Falcon 40B, a foundational LLM with 40 billion parameters and trained on one trillion tokens, as open source for research and commercial use.

AI research organization Hugging Face had Falcon 40B ranked first on its leaderboard for open source LLMs for two months after its release, and as the UAE’s first largescale AI model, the decision to make Falcon 40B open source did raise a few eyebrows. However, Al Bannai says that this was in alignment with how the country and ATRC has chosen to view this domain.

“We are committed in thinking that AI should not be controlled by the few,” he says. “Unlike other things, we think that AI is something that the world at large should be able to leverage. And that’s why we have opened up Falcon, so that we get more people to collaborate on building it. Now, the way you differentiate yourself is by taking that base model, and then specializing it in a particular vertical, say, medical, legal, etc. That will be a proprietary solution that’s not open source, but you’re still building it on the same base, the same foundation. So, what we are saying is let’s all collaborate on this foundation, and each of us can then build off it afterward.”

ATRC, for its part, has done exactly that. In November last year, its VentureOne subsidiary rolled out AI71 as a company that makes use of the Falcon Foundation to deliver transformational AI solutions that are setting new standards in productivity and data sovereignty. With offerings like RAZI71, an AI-enabled healthcare solution, or MIRA71, an AI-powered call center agent, AI71 is looking to make an impact across multiple industries, and Al Bannai reveals that VentureOne is set to roll out more companies in the near feature. At the same time, newer versions of Falcon continue to be released by TII as open source, and its latest iteration, Falcon Mamba 7B, is TII’s first state space language model (SSLM). Following its release in August this year, it was declared by Hugging Face as “the number one globally performing open source SSLM in the world.”

Another validation of ATRC’s moves in this space can be seen in TIME magazine listing Al Bannai as one of the 100 most influential people in AI in September this year. When asked about what this recognition means to him, Al Bannai says that it’s actually a testament to the visionary leadership of the UAE, whose forward-thinking mindset has set the country on a path to becoming a global leader in the AI domain. Be it with the swift decision-making that’s putting the right policies and infrastructure into place, or with the digitization efforts that the government has been championing in both the public and private sector for the last couple of years, Al Bannai wholeheartedly believes that the UAE now has what it takes to be a leader in AI, and by extension, the advanced technology space.

“When Web 1.0 happened, we were not really ready to be a player in that space, and it was a similar situation when Web 2.0 came out,” Al Bannai notes. “But now, when you’re referring to Web 3.0, with AI, blockchain, and other such things, this is a time when we are in a much better position. This is a time when what matters is things like how fast you’re able to move, if you have the digital infrastructure, if you have access to data and talent – and when considering all these factors, we are in a very good position to be a real player.”

Let’s also not discount the resolve and dedication that Al Bannai brings to the proceedings – his experiences of starting from scratch and navigating complex industries are certainly coming in handy as ATRC works to position the UAE as a hub for advanced technology. Al Bannai, for his part, points determinedly once again to the UAE’s leadership for charting this course for the country’s future, while also acknowledging that this is also what is driving his own determination ahead.

“When it’s a mission, it’s no longer a job,” Al Bannai notes. “You really have a much bigger goal.”

This article first appeared in the October issue of Inc. Arabia magazine. To read the full issue online, click here.