Arab Finance: As global enterprise operations increasingly pivot toward automated infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted from an experimental tool to a core driver of macroeconomic growth. This transition is particularly pronounced in Egypt, where the state’s National AI Strategy targets a 7.7% contribution to the national gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. The momentum is further underscored by Egypt’s ranking first in Africa for Government AI Readiness, according to a statement by the Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

 At the center of this regional transformation is Tactful AI, an enterprise technology firm operating dual development hubs in Cairo and Cambridge. Moving beyond traditional, rigid automated chat scripts, the company builds homegrown, native-Arabic agentic customer experience (CX) architecture.

In an exclusive interview with Arab Finance, Mohamed Elmasry, Founder and CEO of Tactful AI, breaks down the strategy behind the company’s recent management buyback, the mechanics of its $1 million pre-Series A funding round, and the realities of establishing proprietary intellectual property (IP) across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

1- In 2024, the founders successfully completed a management buyback. What is the strategic motivation behind regaining full ownership, and how does this independence reshape Tactful AI's long-term vision?

“Ownership is not ego. It is optionality.” The buyback was not about pride of ownership; It is about decision speed. Inside the previous structure, every strategic pivot required alignment with priorities that were not ours. The opportunity in agentic customer experience (CX) is opening fast, and being patient is the most expensive thing a startup can do when it is not allowed to be impatient.

Regaining full ownership in 2024 gives us three things at once: the ability to pick our own customers, the ability to invest in long-cycle bets like agentic execution before the market names the category, and the freedom to build for the Arab region as a primary market rather than a secondary one.

What has changed since is structural. Our roadmap is no longer the sum of compromises. It is the product of conviction. We are building the company we always meant to build, and the speed of that build is now our advantage, not our constraint.

2-You recently announced a pre-Series A funding round in February and reported growth in platform usage over the past year. Can you share the exact numbers? And how will this new capital fuel your expansion in Egypt?

We do not raise capital to validate the thesis. We raise to compress the timeline. The pre-Series A closed in February at $1 million, co-led by Foras AI and M Empire, with participation from deep-tech angel investors and from us as founders. It is structured to fund more than 24 months of focused execution without forcing a premature Series A.

The growth that accompanies the round is real. Platform usage grows 20x year on year (YoY). We cross 100 million processed engagements, with a run rate now exceeding 10 million events every month, and a meaningful share of those resolved end-to-end by agentic execution rather than handed to human agents.

Capital deployment in Egypt is focused. Engineering hires in Cairo, our largest hub. Go-to-market (GTM) expansion across MENA with Cairo as the regional headquarters. Continued investment in the Arabic-first model layer that we believe is the hardest moat to copy. And deliberate investment in the community and ecosystem layer, the editorial and content work that builds category credibility over a multi-year horizon.

3-Your recent focus has shifted toward agentic AI in customer experience. Can you explain how it differs from traditional chatbots and how it allows enterprises to resolve customer requests end-to-end?

“A chatbot answers. An agent acts.” Traditional chatbots route conversations through scripted decision trees. They tell the customer what to do next. Agentic execution does the next thing on behalf of the customer, checks the order, processes the refund, escalates the case, completes the purchase, and updates the customer relationship management (CRM), all inside one conversation, with full audit logs.

The architectural difference is what the system holds in memory. A chatbot holds the last message. An agent holds the customer's full context, purchase history, current intent, business rules, and allowed actions, and reasons about which steps to take.

In production, this shows up as 40% to 80% effective automation, depending on the industry and use case. Retail and fintech with mature data foundations land at the higher end. The cases that route to human agents arrive with the context already loaded, so humans spend their time on judgment, not on data entry. Resolution rate, not deflection rate, is the measure that matters.

4-Tactful AI maintains development hubs in both Cairo and Cambridge. How does this dual presence allow you to combine local Egyptian engineering talent with international standards to build what you have called the "first fully homegrown AI product for CX"?

“Two cities, one product. The split is not symbolic — it is structural.” Cairo gives us engineering scale and native Arabic intuition that you cannot replicate by hiring linguists in London. The team in Cairo does not translate the product into Arabic; they think in Arabic about how Arabs talk to brands. That difference shows up in every line of the model layer.

Cambridge gives us research adjacency, exposure to enterprise-grade procurement standards, and the discipline that comes from operating where the largest global software companies set the bar. It is where we test whether our security, compliance, and architectural choices stand up to scrutiny from buyers in London, New York, or Riyadh.

Calling this the first fully homegrown AI product for CX is not marketing language. The model, the data pipeline, the agentic execution layer, and the Arabic dialect handling were all built in-house. Not licensed. Not wrapped around an off-the-shelf foundation model. The IP is real, and it is built across both cities.

5-As a regional player, how does Tactful AI position itself against global incumbents like Zendesk or Intercom, particularly when it comes to handling the linguistic and cultural nuances of the Arab region?

“Global incumbents build for one language. We build for a region.” Zendesk and Intercom are excellent products. They are also built around an English-first, North American CX paradigm. Their localization layers handle Arabic syntactically — right-to-left rendering, translated user interface (UI) strings, and basic intent detection. They do not handle Arabic culturally.

The Arab region runs on dialect code-switching mid-conversation, on WhatsApp as the default channel rather than a side surface, and on cultural and religious calendars that bend volume curves in ways no global playbook anticipates. Khaleeji is not Egyptian colloquial. Levantine is not Maghrebi. A customer in Riyadh and a customer in Cairo are not the same conversational unit.

Our platform is designed around those realities from day one. It is not a regional skin on a global product. It is a regional product that meets global enterprise bars. That is why our win-rate against incumbents in Arabic-first deployments looks the way it does.

6-The platform has demonstrated a significant ability to boost digital revenue by 15% to 35% in some cases. What specific features of your AI engine drive these conversion rates and improve agent productivity so effectively?

“Revenue lift is never one feature. It is compound execution.” Four mechanics drive this growth. First, agentic recovery, autonomous flows that engage abandoned carts, reorder triggers, and post-purchase questions inside the conversation, closing transactions that would otherwise leak. Second, intent-aware routing, high-value queries skip queues entirely; the platform identifies revenue-significant moments and acts on them.

Third, an agent copilot that compresses average handling time and lifts productivity, humans operate as decision-makers, not data-entry layers. Fourth, conversational commerce, the customer completes purchases inside the chat thread, on WhatsApp or Messenger, without ever moving to a checkout page.

On conversational commerce specifically, we see 2x to 3x conversion rate improvements versus traditional digital funnels. That is the single mechanic with the largest revenue impact. The rest of the compounds: faster resolution, a 40% lift in customer satisfaction (CSAT) on average, and measurable improvement in repeat purchase rate. Revenue is the trailing indicator. Resolution quality is the leading one.

7-With a Series A round targeted within the next 12 months, what key performance indicators (KPIs) are you focusing on to attract the next tier of global and regional investors?

Series A capital follows durability, not noise. Two KPIs sit at the center of how we think about Series A readiness. Net revenue retention (NRR) is the test of whether customers expand once they understand what the platform actually does. NRR is the metric that separates a real product from a procurement event, and it is the one we optimize against month by month.

The second is agentic deflection, the share of engagements resolved end-to-end by the platform, without a human handoff. This is the test of whether the product genuinely executes resolutions, or whether we are another chatbot in expensive clothing. Customers do not pay for AI that needs a human escort for every conversation.

Volume metrics, total engagements, annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth, and logo count — follow if these two hold. Investors at Series A see enough cycles to discount top-line growth that comes with eroding margins or concentration risk. We track these in real time; in dashboards, we hand them to an investor at the first meeting. That alignment between operating reality and investor narrative is the discipline we optimize for.

8-With Cairo hosting the AI Everything Middle East and North Africa summit in 2026, how do you evaluate Egypt's current position as a regional AI hub, and what role does Tactful AI play in the National AI Strategy?

Egypt has the demographics of a continent and the time zone of Europe. That is a generational asset. AI Everything landing in Cairo in 2026 is more than a conference. It is a signal: regional and global stakeholders now treat Egypt as a credible center of gravity for AI capability, not just a labor pool. The conversation moves from can the talent build it to how do we keep the IP here once it is built.

Our role in the National AI Strategy is to be a reference product company — not a services shop, and not a localization vendor for someone else's platform. The hardest gap in the regional AI ecosystem is not talent. It is not capital either. It exists and has product references on a global scale. A homegrown AI product that competes credibly with US incumbents creates a template others can follow.

The strategy succeeds when more companies treat Egypt as where the IP is built, not just where the back office sits. That is the shift we try to be part of — and we would rather be one of several than the only one.

9-Egypt's National AI Strategy targets a 7.7% GDP contribution by 2030. How do you evaluate this target, and what role must the private sector play to achieve it?

The 7.7% target is ambitious. It is also achievable if the private and public sectors stop running in parallel. Hitting that target requires three shifts. First, public sector procurement that treats local AI products as anchor customers rather than perpetual pilot subjects, signed contracts at a real scale, not just memoranda of understanding. Second, university-to-product pipelines: graduates flowing into AI product companies rather than only into outsourcing contracts that build IP for someone else.

Third, capital flow that closes the loop, local limited partners (LPs) into local funds into local AI builders, so the value created here compounds here. The private sector's job is to produce the proof points. Investable companies. Defensible IP. Measurable economic output. If we generate that, the policy framework follows. If we do not, the policy framework is a press release.

The 7.7% target is a forcing function. It will be hit by a handful of Egyptian AI companies achieving global scale, or it will be missed. The question is not whether the target is right. The question is: who is building what counts?

10-With Egypt ranking first in Africa for Government AI Readiness, and a landscape where AI adoption is growing by 100% YoY, how are you navigating the challenge of digital literacy while scaling your enterprise solutions for Egyptian businesses?

“Adoption is not a training problem. It is a trust problem.” Egyptian enterprises will not deploy AI that they cannot audit. The headline of 100% YoY adoption growth is real, but it hides a quieter truth: most deployments are isolated pilots that do not survive into production because the buyer cannot explain what the system does to a regulator, a board, or a customer.

Our approach is governed by AI. Every agentic decision is logged. Every action is traceable. Human-in-the-loop is the default on critical workflows, not a feature toggle the customer has to discover. The customer's team co-designs the deployment with us; they do not receive a tool; they receive a capability they understand and can defend.

Digital literacy follows when AI stops being a black box. The scaling unlock is not more training programs. It is products that are explainable by design. Egypt's first-place ranking in Government AI Readiness in Africa is the signal that the buyer side is moving. Our job is to give them products worth deploying.

11-Beyond Egypt, you have identified some Gulf countries as primary growth markets. How is Tactful AI adapting its conversational commerce solutions to meet the Vision 2030 goals of these Gulf nations?

“Vision 2030 reads like a product brief.” Saudi Arabia and the UAE are scaling commerce, government services, and financial services at a velocity that breaks traditional CX architecture. Vision 2030 names CX excellence as a national-level KPI. The UAE has made an AI-first government a competitive differentiator. The opportunity in the Gulf remains structurally large, and we are committed to serving it with the depth it deserves.

What is evolving is the shape of our expansion. As the agentic AI category matures, we see enterprise demand from the UK and EU that aligns naturally with our Cambridge presence. Our 2026 expansion roadmap now sequences the UK and EU alongside the Gulf, not instead of it. The product is the same; the buyer profile differs, and we are built for both.

Our conversational commerce is shaped by the rails that dominate the region: WhatsApp Business as the primary channel, dialect code-switching, and integrations with local payment infrastructure. That foundation travels well. A product built for the harder market is usually easier to deploy in the easier one.