From Tashkent to Muscat

Almost 50 founders, VC investors and ecosystem builders from the Sultanate of Oman travelled to ICT Week in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, supported by the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology, Riyada, Afouq’s Oman AI Zone, Cyfr, UzOman, KOM and the Oman Embassy in Tashkent. The delegation included ventures such as Zumr (fintech), Mubashir (digital advertising and smart retail technology), Darrbak (an experiential digital marketplace in adventure tourism), Mys EV and Medad. The trip prompted reflections on turning international encounters into tangible progress at home across education, entrepreneurship and artificial intelligence.

"Societies progress when they preserve what matters, question what they do not understand and equip people to contribute," wrote Khalid al Huraibi, summarising the intellectual and practical lessons drawn from meetings in Tashkent and a visit to the Islamic Civilization Center.

Context: meetings, heritage and practical questions

The delegation’s programme mixed business meetings at ICT Week with cultural visits. The Islamic Civilization Center and its exhibits — including the revered Mushaf traditionally attributed to Sayyidna Uthman ibn Affan and the scientific legacy of the Timurid astronomer Ulugh Beg — framed a three-point agenda for Huraibi: education that develops capability, entrepreneurship that connects people to opportunity, and AI that solves problems.

Huraibi pointed to Ulugh Beg’s astronomical catalogue of 1,018 stars as an example of collaborative, sustained scholarly work that combined people, instruments and shared purpose. He argued that Oman’s classrooms could adopt a similar spirit by engaging students in real-world projects: engineering students helping manufacturers reduce waste, business students testing demand for proposed services, and AI learners measuring accuracy and privacy impacts when improving specific processes.

Entrepreneurship and measurable follow-through

On entrepreneurship, the delegation deliberately mixed founders and organisations with diverse capabilities. Huraibi urged a results-oriented approach to post-visit activity: "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."

• Recommendation: each venture to name a person, set a clear objective and a follow-up date to convert goodwill into progress.
• Supporting institutions could run a shared follow-up process to record advances, stalls and reasons, creating a clearer measure of success through partnerships that produce learning, customers and growth.

AI: trials, baselines and Oman AI Zone

On artificial intelligence, Huraibi stressed problem-first pilots. He recommended businesses identify recurring pain points — delays in processing documents, inconsistent quality checks, forecasting errors or time lost searching internal information — and match those problems with founders for carefully scoped trials. Each trial, he wrote, 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?"

Huraibi suggested Oman AI Zone could coordinate connections between problem owners, founders, universities and investors, with its contribution judged by deployed solutions and scaled ventures.

Outlook

Huraibi’s closing call was pragmatic: "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." Turning those recommendations into a routine follow-up process, concrete trials and documented outcomes will determine whether the Tashkent delegation becomes a catalyst for measurable tech and education progress in Oman.