World CIO 200 Summit in Bahrain: A Day of Digital Transformation and Innovation

The Bahrain leg of the World CIO 200 Summit was held today at the Art Hotel in Amwaj Islands. The event was graced by the presence of HH Shaikh Salman bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, VP of the General Sports Authority, who presented the awards to the CIO 200 winners.

The summit was kicked off by Dr. Jassim Haji, president of IGOAI, who spoke about the digital transformation trends in the country and the increasing adoption of emerging technologies such as AI.

This was followed by a panel discussion on ‘digital transformation – pioneering innovation and achieving sustainable growth.’ The discussion, moderated by Ahmed Saleh Albalooshi, Managing Director of Fintech IT Consultations, explored various facets of digital transformation, featuring Humood Al Humood, Director of Information Technology at the Ministry of Finance and National Economy; Anas Kamaluddin, Head of Technology for Strategic Operating Business Units at Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo; and Tareq Abdulrahman Mejhem, Head of IT at the Ministry of Interior. The panelists unanimously agreed that digital transformation strategies need to keep evolving and driving business growth.

As part of the sponsor keynote, Imran Abdulla, GM for the Middle East and Africa at Orbus Software, spoke about how dashboards use AI for the translation of business questions into queries and for chart code generation.

The final panel of the day focused on GenAI use cases with leaders from the academic world. Moderated by Mahmood Aladraj, Chief Executive of VirtuThinko, this panel featured Dr. Fadheela Abbas Hussain, Assistant Professor with a PhD in Computing and Information Sciences at the University of Technology Bahrain; Dr. Hassan Kadhem, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the American University of Bahrain; and Sini Raj, Tutor in BICT – Database at EDICT Polytechnic. Fousing largely on the disruptive impact of GenAI in the education sector, panelists debated about the way to adopt this transformative technology with policies around governnance and monitoring.

CIO 200 winners of the Bahrain edition included: