Daragh McGrath
Recently, I wrote about the questions regional CEOs keep asking me about AI. Where do I start? How do I stay in control? Will it replace my team? Honest questions from leaders at the start of something. Then I saw a post from Alex Lieberman, the Morning Brew co-founder who now runs Tenex, an AI … Read more
Most AI projects we see across the Gulf are quietly failing. Not loudly. There’s no crash and no post-mortem. The pilot just goes quiet, the enthusiasm fades, and a year later, the business is roughly where it started, only now with a subscription it isn’t really using. It’s almost never because the technology doesn’t work. … Read more
Most weeks, I’m across the table from a CEO somewhere in the Gulf. Real estate, financial services, government-adjacent businesses. A year ago, the AI conversation was polite and abstract: what is this, and does it matter? Now it’s sharper, and a bit more uncomfortable: what do I actually do about it, and am I already … Read more
The biggest line in most enterprise creative budgets isn’t the software people use. It’s the software they don’t. Walk into almost any large organisation, and you’ll find the same thing: a full Adobe estate, hundreds of seats, and a usage report that tells a very different story. A handful of designers live in it every … Read more
This is the most common failure mode in brand management, and it is almost never caused by negligence or a lack of care. It happens because retiring old brand assets from circulation is a systems problem, and most organisations try to solve it with communication.
The organisations that will fall behind on Canva AI 2.0 are not the ones that ignore it. They are the ones that treat it as a feature update rather than a platform shift. The difference matters more than it might initially seem.
Most organisations measure the cost of off-brand content in terms of the time and money spent correcting it. A designer’s hours spent fixing the wrong logo. A print job that needs to be redone. An agency fee for work that should have been done in-house but could not be because the tools and templates were not there.
This scenario is familiar to almost every marketing leader who has worked across languages in the UAE market. The translation is accurate. The communication fails.
This scenario plays out across organisations in the UAE with striking regularity. The investment in the visual refresh is significant. The investment in the infrastructure that makes the refresh real is either minimal or absent entirely.
