Al-Obeikan hired Tarik Taman, an American with a long history of executive management in software companies, to be general manager of the new O3ai startup. What convinced Taman to take the job was that he could not find anything else like it on the market: a complete smart factory platform underpinned by a guiding philosophy – the Lean management system.
“Lean transformations drive value, always,” he said. “Automated lean transformations drive even more value, because it’s easier to adopt, easier to track, easier to sustain and easier to optimize because it’s all digital.”
He said that was evident in the results O3ai achieved at Obeikan – in four years it went from a $750 million company to a $1 billion company with a greatly improved bottom line and better employee engagement.
Taman said that even though O3ai emerged from a long-established family company, it has many of the virtues of a startup, thanks to the vision of Al-Obeikan.
“We really have had the good fortune to have something called last-mover advantage,” he said. “We’re one of the first software platforms in our space where the first line of code was written in the 2020s, so we don’t have 10- and 20-year-old legacy code that we’re trying to rewrite the logic of constantly.”
He credits the partnership with Microsoft for providing an extra competitive advantage.
“Because we partnered with Microsoft from day one, because we’ve used all of the infrastructure and service that Azure has to offer, we get to move at higher speed as compared to legacy software.”
Taman said that O3ai started by using machine learning in Azure, but it quickly adopted Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Copilot when they became available. O3ai created its own chatbot that digests and interprets all the data that is constantly being produced by the machines on production lines. Each machine is equipped with a system of sensors that feeds data into O3ai — that system is known as IoT, or the Internet of Things.
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