Ahmed El Beheiry

Speaker Bio

Ahmed is the Executive Vice President, Group Chief Operations Officer & Group Chief Technology & AI Officer at Cassava Technologies. He joined Cassava Technologies Group in May 2022 as a Sr. Advisor to the Group President & CEO for AI.

Ahmed is an entrepreneur, technology executive & an AI expert. He began his career as a design engineer for mobile networks at Alcatel from 1995 to 1998. Ahmed then joined “MobiNil” (currently Orange Egypt) as the Network Development Manager in 1998. In 2002, he joined the company's executive committee as Networks and Roaming Director, a role he held until 2007.

In 2007, Ahmed began his entrepreneurial career, founding ‘Telecomax Group for Investment and Development’, a group of companies providing end-to-end engineering services in telecommunications and information technology across Africa and the Middle East. He served as the group Chairman & CEO till 2016.

In 2013, Ahmed co-founded ‘IDEA; Investment for Development in Emerging Africa’, focusing on human necessities technologies such as ‘water out of thin air’ and ‘solar power’. He served as the company's Managing Director till 2016. Ahmed also founded ‘WAKANDAI Ventures’ in 2019, a technology-savvy investment firm focused on AI startups in Africa & the Middle East.

Ahmed is a Harvard Business School alumnus, having completed the HBS General Management Programme (2020). He also concluded the HBS programmes on Data & AI. Ahmed holds an M.Sc. in Mobile Communication from the University of Alexandria (1997) and an MBA from the University of Rennes (2005). Ahmed has several research contributions in the field of Mobile Communication, published at the Telecom World Conference in California (1997) and in the International Institute for Communication and Information Technology (IEEE) Magazine (2001).

Ahmed served on the Board of Governors of the Pacific Telecommunications Council from 2018 to 2021. He also served as a board member in Telecom Egypt (2016-2019) and Vodafone Egypt (2017-2019).