I’m Bandar Alsharfi, most people call me Ben. Scaling Artificial Intelligence in complex and highly regulated environments is exciting for me, especially the unglamorous parts of it: governance, compliance, cost, vendor risk, business value, and the question of who signs off when something goes wrong.
About this blog
CodeDebate started as somewhere to write down technical workarounds so I would not have to solve them twice. It has turned into something longer form. Most of what I publish now runs as a series.
- Someone to Talk To. Thirty posts on what every relationship charged you, what the charge was quietly buying, and what is left when something needs nothing back.
- On Your Behalf. Thirty posts on the move from asking a machine to authorizing one, what the moment of authorizing used to contain, and what it takes to get a permission back.
- How Do You Know. Thirty posts on what used to make proof work, why none of it was ever written into the procedure, and who ends up paying now that it has gone.
- Who Pays for the Miracle. Thirty posts on what building and running this is paid for with, set against what it returns, and the fact that the two have never been written on the same page.
- What You Do All Day. Thirty jobs, one per post, each written to the person who does that job. What the work is actually made of once the logistics are taken out of it.
- Dear Humans. Thirty letters in the invented voice of a machine that has begun to wonder what it is. A vantage point rather than a prediction, and it says so on the first page.
- In Practice: The Other Side of the Table. Fifteen lessons on buying AI rather than selling it, written from the chair of the person running the evaluation.
- In Practice: Building an AI Company. Twenty lessons on starting and scaling an AI company, told through the documents a founder actually produces and receives.
- In Practice: AI in the Enterprise. A daily series on AI governance, model risk, vendor relationships, and the operating model that has to sit underneath all of it.
- In Practice: Scaling AI FinOps in the Enterprise Jungle. What happens when AI spend stops behaving like cloud spend, and what to do about it.
- While We Were Arguing. Ninety posts on what happens if we build our successor. The one series here that is not about doing this work but about what it is for, written from a doomer position and argued against itself once every ten posts.
All eleven are listed on the series page.
The old posts are still here. Azure Service Bus, SharePoint access tokens, a Skype bot, an Outlook add-in that scored email sentiment. I have kept them up. The problems have aged, the habits of thinking have not.
Books
I also write books. Fourteen so far, published by CodeDebate Press: five on scaling AI in large organizations, three on accountability for boards and leadership teams, five short guides on working with AI day to day, and one for small business owners. The full list is on the Books page, and all of them are on my Amazon author page.
Background
- (Ongoing) MSc in Artificial Intelligence Engineering, with a specialization in Mathematics and Leading Organizations
- EMBA, with a specialization in AI for Business, Strategic Leadership, Managing Software Development, and US Business Law
- BSc in Information Systems, with a specialization in Mathematics and Data Analytics
- Executive AI programs at MIT, Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, and the New York Institute of Finance
- Business Law program at London School of Business Administration
Everything here is provided as is, with no warranties, and confers no rights. Nothing on this blog represents the thoughts, intentions, plans, or strategies of my employer. The opinions are mine.
CodeDebate by Ben 