Nour Al Hassan (Arabic AI, Tarjama) on Building Arabic AI from MENA, Why Most Pilots Fail, and Hiring Only A Players

Nour Al Hassan is the Founder and CEO of Tarjama& and Arabic AI, a UAE-based AI company building Arabic-first language models, enterprise agents, and document intelligence systems for governments and large organisations.

Before Arabic AI, Nour spent more than 16 years building Tarjama& from a bootstrapped translation business into a profitable, technology-led platform serving global enterprises. That long runway of proprietary Arabic data became the foundation for the creation of Arabic AI, enabling a leap into small language models, agentic workflows, and on-prem deployments for highly regulated customers.

She joins the podcast to discuss what it takes to build technology from the region, overcoming internal doubt, why Arabic remains fundamentally underserved in AI, how human-in-the-loop systems will evolve rather than disappear, and why AI adoption fails unless it is driven top-down by leadership rather than delegated to teams.

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Timestamps:

00:00 The State of Arabic Content Online
00:46 Introduction to Nour Al Hassan and Tarjama
03:49 Nour's Entrepreneurial Journey
07:43 Building and Evolving Tarjama
21:14 The Rise of Arabic AI
25:54 Building Custom AI Solutions
26:56 The Importance of Data Quality
29:19 Challenges in Arabic AI Development
31:00 Real-World AI Applications
34:49 Sales and Business Development
38:20 Future of AI and Business Strategy

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