A Conversation with Nadim Sadek
I am drawn to people of mixed-cultural descent and of mixed-race heritage. I'm also drawn to those whose life itineraries are far from commonplace. Because of this, I was delighted to talk to the brilliant entrepreneur, Nadim Sadek. Today he is widely-known for pioneering and leading Shimmr AI, an AI-based advertising technology company designed to be a vital resource for the publishing industry. Part-Egyptian, part-Irish, Sadek is a thoughtful and warm man - what we used to call a renaissance man thanks to his progressive spirit, cosmopolitan outlook and astonishingly diverse range of expertise. He also possesses that increasingly vital 21st century trait: a willingness to disrupt things. With his quirky way with words, he shared this self-reflection with me. It is a perfect window onto the man himself:
"I understand that the narrative arc of my own career has included fairly continuous disruption of industries in which I have worked. In my own way, I've grown up believing that it's possible to have a positive impact on our world and I suppose I do try to make "good things happen". I've noticed that I always do this inter-personally. I've now been a CEO continuously for 30 years and it's true that I'm only comfortable leading a business if I think it's making a new, different and better impact on the industry in which it operates"
Sadek: I’ve had the great fortune to be born ‘diverse’ and to ‘live diverse’. My father was Egyptian and my mother Irish. Two months after I was born in Cairo, we moved to Ghana then Nigeria and Kenya, before also living in Malaysia, Indonesia, then Barbados and Antigua. Ultimately, I went to University in Dublin. This did indeed all flow from my father’s work, not as a diplomat but as an international civil servant working for the World Health Organisation. Now, I’m based in London but travel the world on work.
In Nigeria, we lived in the lovely Jericho district of Ibadan, near the university. My father was a socialist and entirely unconvinced by private education or property ownership. Accordingly, we tended to live modestly and, by and large, I didn’t go to fancy schools. I’m glad this was the case because I’m sure that some of my experiences would have been otherwise out of reach.
Now that I’m older and can be a bit more reflective, I have sometimes been struck by a memory I have of my time at All Saints Church school in Jericho. We learned how to sing ‘Ring a Ring a Rosie’ in the school playground and I have graphic memories of the smiling faces we shared as we held hands and danced around. In Western Europe, I am not considered to be entirely “white” but to the kids singing and dancing with me in Nigeria that’s probably exactly how I looked. What gives me pause for thought, now, is how I never once felt peculiar, different or like an outsider. I was never bullied nor isolated. I’m quite sure that a sole, black child in a white school would not feel as safe nor included as I did. I’m very grateful for that generosity of spirit that I experienced early in my life. I’m sure it was formative.
My other abiding memory of Ibadan was my friendship with Olagunju and Alayo Ogunbiyi. We lived in the same block of flats and spent all of our time together. I’m absolutely thrilled that I am in touch with them today and I share here a couple of pictures of us from that time. I remember our mothers scolding us for looking like a mess and sending us off to get better dressed and cleaned up for the photographer who took these shots. The plasters on my knee are hilarious. I have the same ones today, having just crashed off my bicycle in London! Some things never change…
Sadek: I’m sometimes embarrassed that I have spent most of my productive career trying to earn more money. In contrast, my father was preoccupied with public health and improving societies. My mother was similar being both a nurse and a teacher. It is true to say that we used to chat about where we would be moving next in the world by reference to the plague or pestilence we would be dealing with there. For example, I associate a move to Malaysia with my father’s role in dealing with a cholera epidemic at that time.
The fearlessness of my parents in setting up our home in so many different countries in quick succession, and my father’s determination to make a positive impact on the health infrastructure in each country, has no doubt imbued me with a sense of ‘nothing being too hard to do’, and ‘making an effort’ always being worth it.
Sadek: My goodness, I don’t think of myself as having such a grand perspective.
I remember a couple of advertising lines from my time in Nigeria. One was ‘twist well, twist Shell’. We would sing this one as we travelled in our car. I liked its exuberance. The other was “Better be late, Mr. X, than the late Mr. X’. Strangely, this latter one has remained with me as a piece of wisdom throughout my life. I still think of it if I’m tempted to speed on my motorbike. My point is, even from childhood, I was hearing ‘well-being’ messages in Nigeria.
I learned a lot, at an impressionable age, in Africa. Despite the mixed reviews that African countries receive in the world, my experience was of joyfulness, kindness, laughter, and easy friendship. Our surroundings didn’t matter anywhere near as much as our relationships.
As I don’t position myself as a politician or a macro economist, I’m simply going to say that such bonhomie and ability to take pleasure in human relationships, that ability to feel and transmit joy, to converse, to sing and to dance, should never be underestimated as a huge ingredient in contentment and well-being. If only the world could laugh as easily as Africans, if only they learn to cope so well with limited resources and be content, if only the world could be as patient. If I could, I’d bottle ‘African Tranquillity’ and get everyone to be better grounded every day. I know I’m speaking in gross stereo-types.
I taught my own kids a game called ‘African Eyes’. If they lost a ball in some bushes, we’d go into them and I’d get us to sit completely still, moving only our eyes, till we found the lost ball. It showed them the value of stillness and observation. I think these things are good for the soul.
To answer your question, then, I’d get Africa to love being African.
Market researcher, whiskey magnate, island-owner & lifestyle curator, music manager and motorbike journalist. Richard Branson comes to mind and readers will agree that Nadim Sadek’s CV is not typical of a founder of corporate bodies. Through several interviews and talks he has given, (available on YouTube), I’ve followed Sadek’s career. Through this interview on Borders I hope to reveal or to at least get a glimpse of the threads that connect such a breadth of entrepreneurial experiences.
(I’m thinking here about a comfort you may have with liminality. This may translate as a comfort with movement from one thing to the next.)
Sadek: You might be more successful in understanding why I have done what I’ve so far done with my life! Though I have not been spared difficult circumstances and challenges across my life, my overall reflection is that I’ve lived a gilded one full of happiness and treasures. I had dinner the other evening with an Indian friend who offered me a perspective I had never before considered. She suggested that some of my misfortunes have been deliberately self-inflicted as an antidote to a sense of guilt I feel about having been so happy for most of my life. Goodness! That was a deep one. Do we all sometimes deliberately self-sabotage?
The reality is that I’ve always felt that I am from nowhere and comfortable everywhere. I’ve lived in right-wing and left-wing countries. Experienced Muslim Christian, Buddhist and other religious influences. Known almost every creed and colour. I’d be naïve to claim that I’m wholly un-prejudiced and I don’t want to claim exceptional virtue, but something about my upbringing and life has led me to try to be universally tolerant. I despise the notions of geo-political ‘adversaries’ and ‘warrior mentalities’ that some leaders demagogically try to stir up. I just start out every relationship essentially liking people. Some of my friends tell me I trust too easily, but isn’t it better to live life with benevolence than to begin each day with distrust?
I guess I’m ‘culturally mobile’, comfortable in most places and easy-going with most people. It’s probably why I studied philosophy and psychology – I’ve always needed to tune into societal mores and personal beliefs to understand where I am and to be appropriate to my context. Now I do it for a living!
The short answer to your question is that I believe one’s wealth is measured by the success of our inter-personal relationships. Our world is about people.
Sadek: I have always favoured origination over evaluation. Innovation over iteration. Creation over commentary. Even when I read books at school, I itched to write my own one rather than submit a critical essay dissecting the author’s work. To this day, I struggle to finish reading anything without peeling off to write a note or record a thought that’s just been stimulated. Some describe this as a creative restlessness. I just try to wake each day, open to learning and discovering things.
In my career, I can see that I’ve evolved from iteration to innovation. Sadek Wynberg Research was a good iteration upon a well-known model of qualitative market research. We became the biggest business of its type in the world because we did things better than they’d ever been done before – not something new, just better.
ProQuo was my first foray into a symbiosis of AI and psychology – creating AI-driven action plans for businesses to manage their brands. I was fascinated by how AI was beginning to capture whole swathes of specialised thinking and make it more widely available.
Shimmr AI brings creativity and AI more closely together. Not only do we help authors’ work to be emotively manifested and discovered, we also create our own artefacts – campaigns of advertisements – which are the product of the conjunction of AI, engineering and subtle human thinking about how to be expressive.
Inish Turk Beg was a brand I built after buying an island in the Atlantic, just off the west coast of Ireland. That whole ‘land and brand’ development was my most creative achievement to date, I believe. We had a major civil engineering programme, on land and under-sea, and created a multi-domain brand in music, food and whiskey. We had artist residences, produced and recorded music. It was a synthesis of imagination, resource and some madness. And it was wonderful!
Meanwhile, we brought new values to several industries…
Sadek: Well, it was simple in a way. I positioned the brand as ‘Living Life at a Tilt’. It was about all the ‘ins’ – invigoration, inspiration, innovation. People expected me to have an island life with all the ‘re’s – relaxation, rejuvenation, retreat. But I never felt more alive than I did living and working there, whether it was moving chains for anchors on boats, designing a new typography for the brand or tending animals. Everything was authentic and lived as an experience. This was fully expressed in the art and music we produced, as well as in the design of our whiskey and food. It was a life well-lived.
Each of these ventures has been hugely fulfilling. A by-product of each is also the special interactions I enjoy with exceptionally talented people – once more, life (and business) is all about relationships.
Market research is about understanding people, and so is music, so is branding—so even, is whiskey.
Sadek: You’ve spotted the common characteristic! I’m pre-occupied with understanding the two operating systems humans appear to have – our feelings, and our thoughts. Feelings are implicit, immediate, reflexive and help us to navigate our world, not just emotionally but also in mundane matters. Thoughts are much more explicit, tend to be rational and we use them for discourse and argument. We think this rationality is what separates us from other creatures on earth, but I wonder…
In the last few centuries, we’ve pedestalised thinking, and delegitimised feeling. It’s usually a criticism to be called ‘emotional’. I believe that what humans truly do better than AI is to feel. We’re going to see the return of feelings as a means of judging whether a decision or action is a good one. I believe we’re going to embrace feeling as a better way to navigate the world.
Desire – the point of your question – is driven by many different parts of our brain, including our ancient, often-reflexive amygdala. In truth, desire is about feeling things. We need to reacquaint ourselves with how wise and reliable our ‘gut’ is – and to learn to trust it afresh.
Understanding that seduction – with people, branding, music, whiskey – appeals to our feelings and persuasion follows, affecting our thinking, has been useful to me in developing brands and communications.
Sadek: Shaefri is a Warner-signed artist I manage, who is quite brilliant. You can follow her via the links here, including her new release, ‘Back in my Body’: https://linktr.ee/Shaefri
In truth, like so many contemporary creators, she self-manages. Artists are very aware of their personal brands and how to engage with audiences. It’s a pleasure working with her, as I have done for more than 10 years. (Spoiler alert – she’s also one of my daughters!)
Sadek: It’s well known that musical and mathematical talent often go hand-in-hand. It’s the same with technologists and data-scientists – all of them are pattern-spotters. As a manager of these talents, I simply recognise that they need to be in their grooves, so my job is to protect them from interruption and to give them confidence to pursue their instincts. Of course, work and life complicates this, and one sometimes needs to course-correct their efforts, or offer a perspective they’re not seeing themselves.
I largely view my job now as bringing out the best in others. They need to trust you, understand that you see them, and accept your interventions as being ‘for the best’ rather than driven by one’s ego and personal aggrandisement. I’m truly honoured that others allow me to give direction to their efforts.
AI continues to reshape various aspects of our lives. Its impact on creativity, knowledge acquisition, and even our understanding of citizenship is becoming increasingly profound. Given his experience, Sadek’s insights are particularly valuable on AI's role in these areas and on AI’s role in accelerating the emergence of world society.
Sadek: Did I? That’s peculiar language from me!
I’m an optimist about AI’s effect on the world, and I do talk about how ‘AI will make humans, more human’. It’s back to that notion of reacquainting ourselves with the primacy of feelings. Feelings are where creativity flows from. Sure, we think our way to exceptionally clever solutions and concepts, but we’re stirred by feelings.
I like to invite people to be courageous enough to express themselves, to allow their personalities to flow into their lives. We spend too much time constraining ourselves, pouring our bodies and souls into suits and professional templates that restrict our expression. I’m not advocating for chaotic, asocial, insensitive ‘just say and do whatever you want’ behaviour. But I’m clear that a lot of what we steel ourselves to get right with judgment and evaluation will be done by AI, and increasingly we’ll be able to be more intuitively expressive.
In that sense, perhaps, we are ‘resting’ into our true natures.
Sadek: I’ve written a collection of children’s stories, and was lucky enough to have them edited by the Editor-in-Chief of a major publishing house. She gave me lots of helpful, constructive advice, as a good, collaborative editor should do. The stories improved. I felt confident.
I then gave my manuscript to an AI-editing platform. To my astonishment, it gave me nuanced, smart observations that neither I nor the editor had considered. For example, it remarked that ‘though it’s clear across the stories that you don’t have a colonialist agenda, there’s a vignette in story 3 where the young boy has a confrontation with another from the local village, which might be misapprehended as a show of ex-pat superiority. Please consider whether you might reconfigure their confrontation’. Wow.
The editor’s humanity helped me in myriad ways to be sure the stories were good enough to be published. AI helped me ensure that I didn’t inadvertently strike chords that weren’t my intention. The collaboration between author, editor and AI improved the work. I think this is a relevant example of how to see AI as a creative companion.
Sadek: I believe AI will affect society, culture, politics, philosophy, religion, our own evaluation of our worth, and a host of other things, not least our professional workflows and creativity.
GenZ have already expressed their dissatisfaction with the notion of life-long commitments to careers, and distrust some of the values they’ve been asked to live with by older generations. They resent the state of the planet they’re inheriting and wonder how they can improve things. They don’t accept the status quo, including around learning and education. GenA won’t even understand how we used to ‘Google’, looking at 20 links, trying to synthesise sense out of various sources. Their world is natively AI.
It's clear that our old notions of wisdom – liken it to a big hard disc in someone’s head, crammed full of information they access and articulate – will evolve, so anyone can become instantaneously ‘wise’ now, accessing and ‘streaming’ all of humanity’s knowledge. This will become increasingly true as AI learns more richly and ‘thinks’ better.
With this fresh abundance of freely-accessible information, the task in which we excel becomes critical thinking, not memorisation. In education, we must quickly teach the importance of understanding sources, weighting information by understanding characteristics of sources, and arriving at circumspect conclusions.
In contrast to much of my argument about enabling humans to feel more, this is a crucial piece of upgrading our powers of thinking. We do feel and think. Critical thinking will become a human superpower too.
Sadek: Most major technologies have been brought to us by governments, like nuclear power. AI is remarkable in the way it has come to us via corporations – OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, the owners of DeepSeek and Mistral, and others. As the initial rush becomes more comprehensible to us all, we’re seeing AI becoming politicised. Models already reflect the realities of the societies from which they emanate with easily-found restrictions in content and perspectives, and narratives that reflect prevailing policies. This is an interesting tension – between the aspiration to delight customers that is inherent in any successful commercial entity, and the more restricting context in which it is governed. Which do we trust more – Gemini from Google, or the Government of Georgia? There’s another thing happening with AI. We’re learning to cross borders more easily. If you exhaust the repertoire of ‘Scandi-Noire’ literature, AI can help you to identify that a set of Congolese authors have written in a similar vein. Then it translates it for you. And narrates it. You discover literature from other cultures. You open your eyes, open your mind. Borders become culturally porous, we begin to find parallels in our lives that reinforce our unity, rather than divisive notions of adversity, irreconcilable conflict and difference.
With some of the current loud drum-beats in the world, it seems hard to believe, but, quietly, AI is helping us to understand our similarities and drawing us closer as a world-community. Our centre of gravity will shift a little away from parochial notions of national identity through country-citizenship and gradually re-anchor in understanding our shared values and experiences as humans.
African publishing has been slow to adopt AI in Africa, lament Justin Salani and Mass Masona Tapfuma, in their recently published article in frontiersin.org. Titled, Artificial Intelligence Transforming the Publishing Industry: A Case for the Book Sector in Africa, these are the discouraged words of the authors: “There’s a dearth of literature on the adoption, challenges and opportunities associated with the integration of AI in the production, dissemination and distribution of publications in the book sector in Africa…Though the book sector in Europe and Asia have made strides in integrating AI into their day-to-day operations along the value chain, Africa, unfortunately, is a slow adopter of emerging and disruptive technologies” This final part of my interview with Sadek explores the challenges and opportunities AI presents for African writers, publishers, and content creators. As part-Egyptian and as a passionate advocate for AI in publishing, in addressing my questions, his insights are invaluable.
Sadek: Globally, I’m seeing publishing’s increasingly confident embrace of AI for corporate efficiency, and still-hesitant adoption for creative emancipation. If people suggest the African continent is “behind”, I consider for a moment what it is to stand inside a printer’s shop in Ibadan during load-shedding, or to price a month of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) time when the invoice arrives in hard currency. Africa’s hesitation is not philosophical, it’s infrastructural, financial, linguistic and regulatory. Erratic power, expensive bandwidth and thin margins mean a small press in Accra simply can’t gamble on experiments that won’t earn back their dollar cost. Add the shortage of locally-trained machine-learning talent and the fact that most models struggle the minute they meet Yoruba tone marks or Amharic script, and you see true challenges.
Sadek: Cloud credits underwritten by regional banks, training sets built from publisher backlists so the models “speak” our languages (giving publishers and authors new incomes), outcome-based grants that pay when an AI prototype demonstrably trims print-run waste; and, above all, clear copyright guard-rails so no-one fears they are feeding their IP into a black hole. These are just some examples.
I’m sure Africans don’t want to be ‘left behind’ with AI. And that Africans are well-acquainted with critical thinking because our conversational cultures involve carefully weighing arguments, more than rote learning. The continent is – once more begging forgiveness for the over-arching stereotype – attitudinally very well set-up to excel with AI.
Sadek: I have argued that AI will make humans more human. The same holds for literature. A large language model that can translate a Hausa novella into Korean, then read it aloud in a synthetic voice that still hears the music of the original, is not stealing anyone’s story; it’s acting as a loud-speaker. The real risk of erasure comes when rights metadata is lost at birth. If every paragraph carries an immutable creator ID, then usage becomes traceable, royalties flow and the voice stays tethered to its owner. Fine-tune the model on African literary criticism before you let it loose on marketing copy, and the amplification remains faithful to the original. My own book, ‘Shimmer, don’t Shake – how Publishing can Embrace AI’ was written in English, and is now (or shortly will be released) in Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, Tamil and Hindi. Nearly every edition is translated by AI, with some polishing by editors. I also cloned my voice to produce an English audio-book. My Greek publisher is using that voice and I’ve heard myself speaking Greek! My book with its initially small, English-speaking audience is now available to over half of the readers of the world. All Africans authors and publishers can do what I’ve done.
Sadek: Phew. I tend not to ‘warn governments’! But since you ask… There’s a tendency to swing between cheerleading and paralysis. I plead for a middle path. Africa needs models whose training data doesn’t teach them that Nairobi is “dangerous” while ignoring the nuance of ‘Uhuruness’. Equally, let’s not freeze until the perfect one arrives. Under-engaging with AI risks always moving at a slower pace, with less incision and more ham-strung imagination. Under-engaging constrains ambition. AI liberates talent that has struggled to find expression and articulation. It helps to build things people have conceived but couldn’t make. It’s important to educate, experiment, evolve. An economy or society unacquainted with AI, and not adept with its tools, will inevitably find itself economically and creatively challenged. This is not a wave of technology that one can afford to fall behind. Doing so consigns society to a sense of inadequacy and anachronism.
Sadek: I hear stories like a nineteen-year-old who storyboards a TikTok poem on a cracked Android phone and still finds the energy to code at night. My own company’s technical team is in South Africa. Africa is full of perfectly suitable talent to adopt and develop AI. In Egypt, for example, universities are churning out brilliant computer engineers who can be productive in a global market-place.
Models need curators to sift Yoruba folktales from online detritus; trainers who can prompt in Wolof and Chichewa; voice actors to lend an authentic timbre to audiobooks. We need product evangelists who understand how Africans are most likely to employ AI applications in the practical context of their lives and work. It’s also possible to turn the continent’s linguistic abundance into an advantage. The future will include ‘minor’ language to ‘minor’ language interactions. English may be the global lingua franca, but AI will cross-fertilise cultures beyond the anglophonic ones. AI offers new opportunities.
Sadek: At Shimmr, we’ve proven that a back-list title can be resurfaced, emotively presented with advertising faithful to the author’s intentions and pushed to audiences pre-disposed to respond positively to, and buy, the title. We do this ‘automated advertising’ only in English at the moment, mainly in the UK and USA. But it’ll soon be available in all languages and markets. In essence, Shimmr is an advertising ‘agent’ (not agency). Our AI reads the book to determine what its unique BookDNA is (its structure and psychological profile), to produce an advertising strategy that surfaces the most emotive and compelling aspects of the book. It identifies what will move people to feel good about the book. This becomes the creative brief for an advertising campaign we autonomously produce, bringing to life the author’s work in a compelling way that cuts through all the noise of our daily lives. Finally, the campaign is autonomously deployed into media channels where the matched audiences are found. In short, every book is brought to life and finds its audience.
Our aim is to help authors have more reach and recognition, publishers to have better returns on the investments they’ve made in publishing great books, and readers to be matched with more fulfilling books. I don’t want to be pretend we’re noble, but this is a pretty virtuous and constructive deployment of AI. Shimmr can help African literature be better discovered, bought and read.
Sadek: Over a coffee in a noisy café in Yaba, my opening counsel would be: fall in love with the reader’s problem, not your algorithm. Any product that isn’t easing a human itch won’t work. I’d also share a starter-kit for building a durable AI company. Guard your data as fiercely as your cash. It’s the only moat a larger rival can’t clone overnight. Document your prototypes so that a Series-A investor sees your discipline. Be careful with your burn-rate because although AI now attracts roughly thirteen per cent of African tech funding, the median cheque is smaller than it was three years ago (African Private Capital Association (AVCA) Venture Capital Activity in Africa – Q2 2024 report.). Africa’s diversity is its strength and its challenge. It brings more riches than any other continent. Organising and monetising its words, feelings and thoughts is the goal for the new tech-miner.
Thank you to Nadim Sadek for sharing his time and worldview with me. I particularly appreciate the way he presented AI for corporate and personal use in such clear, applicable ways, while evoking its fantastic scope and transformative magic—and opening the window onto the restrictions already limiting it.
I am grateful for the open-ended hope he leaves with us about Africa’s interior life—her words, feelings, and thoughts—being her true gold. For the continent’s emerging generation of creators and entrepreneurs, it’s strategic to grab the opportunity—to grab the narrative bull by the horns—and ride our native advantage.
What do I mean? We are the ones who can weave into and out of African stories the true visceral meaning drawn from our interior lives and heritage. No one can do that for us—or like us. To comb through the treasure of our words, feelings, and thoughts and to make visceral meaning are sacred acts—and the preserve of local storytellers, not mere traders. Listening to Sadek, it’s clear that even AI, for all its brilliance, persistence, and the flood of suggestions it yields, cannot replicate this organic capacity or this sacred act. Not yet. And it may never be able to—not entirely. Our young entrepreneurs are already here—mining not just code, but their multiplicity of cultures. They are not just systems engineers; they are storytellers. Some stereotypes about Africans carry power.
Across the continent, there are young innovator-entrepreneurs busy finding ways to organize and amplify Africa’s interior richness—with AI as a partner, not as their master.
It won’t be those who arrive first who will mine our gold or shape our future. Our beautiful ones are already born, already here—mining Africa’s gold on her own terms.
David Aguilar, born in Andorra, is an inspiring figure known for his resilience and crea ...
