Closing a $500 billion AI value gap: an advancement by an Egyptian Operator

As the world races to advance and adopt artificial intelligence, a quiet but consequential shift has been underway. Analysts estimate that while companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in AI, there remains a gap of up to $500 billion between investment and realized value, particularly in enterprises. Much of that gap has been attributed to difficulties integrating AI into existing core processes and governance structures.

An Egyptian Operator, Karim El Sewedy, was at the core of a recent launch that helps close that gap. According to Silicon Valley-based AI company Retool, the launch of their new AI Agents product that allows developers to automate value at scale. El Sewedy spearheaded the six-month effort to bring this unlikely product to market.

AI Agents is a platform that allows businesses to build, manage and monitor AI Agents that are embedded into enterprise workflows and “can do real work” in the business. The product connects directly with models provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others. Similar to Retool’s original core product offering, El Sewedy describes this as an AI Agent factory, where “you can build all of your Agents in one place.”

While many organizations incorporate ChatGPT and other chatbots into their work today, many have been searching for a way to unlock real enterprise value. El Sewedy suggests a mindset shift of looking at AI as not just being experimental but as being embedded into core operational workflows. Companies should aim to reorganize and rebuild core processes using AI one at a time. He predicts that the AI bubble will pop and companies will be forced to reconsider how it thinks about value being generated by the technology.

To make this launch happen, El Sewedy had to design a completely new operating model for the company. Given that this was the biggest launch since the company’s founding, they had to rethink how to redesign the organization to move quickly towards an ambitious goal. “We introduced new organizational systems and processes, but also innovated existing ones,” El Sewedy says.

The launch involved several operational challenges. Deploying AI systems at scale required extensive testing under real-world conditions, particularly given the “probabilistic nature of AI outputs.” El Sewedy mentions that there’s also the organizational tradeoff between speed and polish, which is increasingly common in the world of AI.

Retool’s original product offering was a low-code platform for building internal tools. The company scaled quickly from an early stage startup to a $3.2 billion valuation – in less than 5 years. Today, the product is used by over 10,000 companies worldwide, including some of the leading Egyptian companies.