Note sull'episodio
He'd just landed his dream job. Three months later, he resigned, moved to Riyadh and set out to build medical AI for a language he couldn't speak.
In this episode of WHV Insider, Steve Moore is joined by Dr Umair Khan, former NHS haematology registrar and Co-Founder of Sahl AI, the Riyadh-based company building Arabic-first AI for clinical documentation.
It started with an English demo and one question from the CEO of Riyadh First Health Cluster: "Can you do this in Arabic?" The team said a few weeks. It took nearly two years. In a Saudi clinic, Arabic isn't one language problem but several: regional dialects, colloquial rather than formal Arabic, and doctors who switch into English medical terms mid-sentence.
Umair explains how Sahl AI became the first international company in the cluster's incubator, why a public partner everyone warned would be slow moved fast, and how an ethics rejection became the route to real-world data and a peer-reviewed study in JMIR Medical Informatics. He's also candid about what he'd do differently, and why Sahl AI no longer calls itself a scribe.
In this episode:
- From NHS registrar and academic clinician to health tech founder
- "Burning the ships": leaving a dream job and moving his family to Riyadh
- Why open-source models failed on Saudi dialects and code-switching
- Partnering with Riyadh First Health Cluster, from MOU to boots on the ground
- Why real clinical conversations beat actors and synthetic speech
- Clinical validation as a selling point, not a distraction
- The mistakes: going part-time, cultural nuance, and product vs speed to market
- Vision 2030 on the ground, two and a half years in
- What's next: from documentation to coding, orders and revenue cycle management
For anyone building health tech for Saudi, this is an honest founder's account of what localisation really means, and what it takes to get it right.
Connect with Dr Umair Khan on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-umair-khan-phd/and find Umair's email and contact details via Sahl AI at https://sahl.ai