Almost 50 founders, VC investors and ecosystem builders from the Sultanate of Oman participated in ICT Week in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, with support from the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology, Riyada, Afouq’s Oman AI Zone, Cyfr, UzOman, KOM and Oman Embassy in Tashkent. Founders and investors included Zumr in fintech, Mubashir in digital advertising and smart retail technology, Darrbak experie digital market place in adventure tourism, Mys EV and Medad, to name a few. We travelled to explore partnerships and opportunities. I returned thinking about a deeper question: how can we turn encounters with people, technology and history into practical progress at home?
Between the meetings at ICT Week and reflections inspired by the Islamic Civilization Center in Tashkent, three priorities became clearer to me: Education that develops capability, entrepreneurship that connects people to opportunity, and artificial intelligence that solves problems.
The Center offered a starting point. Bringing spiritual, scientific and cultural heritage into one setting encourages visitors to consider how knowledge travels across generations. The revered Mushaf traditionally attributed to Sayyidna Uthman ibn Affan RA recalls the responsibility of preserving knowledge. The legacy of scholars such as Timurid Amir, astronomer and mathematician Ulugh Beg invites us to consider how new knowledge is created.
For me, the connection is straightforward: Societies progress when they preserve what matters, question what they do not understand and equip people to contribute.
This brings me to education. Ulugh Beg’s astronomical work depended on scholars working together, observing carefully and building on earlier knowledge. Their tables included a catalogue of 1,018 stars. Behind that achievement were people, instruments, sustained effort and a shared intellectual purpose.
What would this spirit look like in Oman’s classrooms today? It could begin with students working on real challenges alongside businesses and public institutions. An engineering class could help a manufacturer reduce waste. Business students could test whether customers need a proposed service. Students learning AI could examine how it might improve a specific process, while checking accuracy and protecting information.
Assessment would then consider the quality of their questions, evidence, teamwork and results. Knowledge becomes meaningful when learners understand what they can do with it.
The second lesson concerns entrepreneurship. Our delegation brought together founders and organisations with different capabilities. That diversity creates possibilities, but a visit only becomes valuable through what follows it.
I believe each participating venture should identify one promising relationship from Tashkent and agree on a concrete next step. This might be a customer introduction, a distribution discussion, a technical collaboration or a small trial. A named person, a clear objective and a follow-up date would help turn goodwill into progress.
Supporting institutions could make this easier through a shared follow-up process. Founders need timely introductions and help resolving specific obstacles. Recording what advances, what stalls and why would also improve future delegations.
This approach would give us a clearer measure of success: partnerships that produce learning, customers and growth.
The third lesson concerns AI. For Oman, the question is where AI can deliver a useful improvement that someone is willing to adopt and pay for.
We could start by inviting businesses to identify recurring problems: delays in processing documents, inconsistent quality checks, difficulties forecasting demand or time spent searching internal information. Suitable founders could then work with these businesses on carefully scoped trials.
Each trial should begin with a baseline and a simple measure of success. Did processing become faster? Did errors decline? Did employees gain time for more valuable work? Decisions about expansion should follow the evidence.
Oman AI Zone could help organise these connections between problem owners, founders, universities and investors. Its contribution would become visible through the solutions it helps deploy and the ventures it helps scale.
The Islamic Civilization Center added a dimension to these reflections. Heritage can encourage confidence and curiosity when it helps us understand how earlier generations learned, collaborated and contributed.
Oman has its own intellectual, maritime and commercial traditions to draw upon. We can bring them into contemporary learning through stories, research and practical projects that connect past experience with future possibilities.
My strongest takeaway from Tashkent is a call to follow through. Give life-long learners meaningful problems. Help founders reach customers. Test AI against measurable needs.
Then return to the people we met with something more valuable than a greeting: evidence that a conversation has become a contribution. That would be a journey worth continuing.
Khalid al Huraibi
The writer is an innovator and an insights storyteller.
Email: khalidalharibi@gmail.com
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