Yaser Al-Onalzan

Dr. Yaser Al-Onaizan is the Deputy CEO &President of AI Products at HUMAIN.
Previously, he served as CEO of the National Center for AI (NCAI), the innovation, research, and development arm of the Saudi
Data and AI Authority (SDAIA). At NCAI, he led a team of over 600 scientists and engineers, advancing Saudi Arabia’s national
Arabic LLM capabilities, including the launch of ALLaM in collaboration with IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure.
Prior to returning to Saudi Arabia, Dr. Al-Onaizan spent five years at Amazon, where he led key AI initiatives focused on speech and
language services. He headed the AI Languages Lab, managing over 100 scientists and engineers across multiple regions, and
contributed to establishing AWS AI’s presence in New York City.
Earlier in his career, he spent 15 years at IBM Research and the Watson Group, where he led work in neural machine translation,
speech translation, multilingual information extraction, and medical coding. He directed several multi-year DARPA projects in
collaboration with leading universities worldwide, including Stanford, MIT, CMU, and Cambridge.
Dr. Al-Onaizan has been recognized with multiple international awards, has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers, and holds
more than 20 patents. He is a senior member of several professional organizations, has served as program chair for international
conferences, and was Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions as well as a board member of AMTA.
He holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, and an
MBA from Columbia University