Microsoft Qatar’s Country Manager, Lana Khalaf
Microsoft Qatar plans to intensify its efforts in helping SMEs and startup companies to accelerate their business in the country. While the global IT company has had strong partnerships with a number of government sectors in Qatar in the previous years, it now also plans to be more involved in the country’s growing SME and startup industry, and help close the technology gap which market insiders say exists between the government and the private sector.
“We were not involved in a way to really close this gap and be involved between the government and the SMEs, startups and incubators. This is something we recently added to our agenda in Qatar. We recently identified and studied the gaps out there.
And soon all the incubation centres will receive a lot of information about how they can use Microsoft technology to accelerate their business and what Microsoft can do to help them,” said Microsoft Qatar’s Country Manager, Lana Khalaf while speaking at a panel discussion organised by the Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) in Doha recently.
Khalaf added that Microsoft has already started implementing its new strategy and recently sponsored 10 startups from the Digitial Incubation Centre, Qatar Science and Technology Park, and others.
The sponsored startups have been mentored by experts from Microsoft, and were guided about their product inventions, useful technologies for their business, and were also advised about what kind of businesses are worth pursuing in the future.
“I agree that the gap was there before. But Qatar also saw this that it created a research centre for startups and SMEs that is bridging the gap between the government and the private sector. The strategy was just released. And I think in the coming months you will see a big change in the country on this,” she added.
Khalaf went on to reiterate the need for SMEs and startups to adopt digital technologies, citing a study which highlighted how several SMEs have earned about $100m more on net income by going digital. She added that while the e-commerce space in Qatar has been consistently growing, she still has not yet seen Artificial Intelligence (AI) infused in e-commerce as a new way to deal with customers.
She said: “AI is definitely something that is changing the world and how companies respond to their customers. Today, to better respond to your customers you need to better understand them. You need to understand what to sell them, when to sell, and why you need to sell a certain product.
The only way to do that is to aggregate a lot of data, analyse this, and create AI models to do these things. And instead of spending a lot of money as a startup in doing ‘trial and error’ tests, you now have AI which can do these tests for you in seconds. Adopting AI will give you the competitive advantage as an SME to even compete with companies that have been in the market for 15 years”.
