AI Governance & Product Leader · Dubai, UAE

I wrote the AI policy. I also have to ship under it.

I lead AI governance and product across large regulated institutions in the UAE and Qatar, with advisory work spanning higher education and government-backed startup programmes. Five mandated policies, twelve platforms, 140,000 users. All under the same rules.

Sutharsan CP, AI Product and Governance Leader
17 yrs
Global experience
140K+
Active users
48
Institutions under the policy
12+
Platforms shipped under it
What I do

Four practices, one discipline.

Most governance leaders write rules for other people and never pay the cost. I write the rules and then have to build under them, which is why they are shippable.

01

AI Governance & Policy

I authored the AI policy set that every GEMS school is mandated to follow: use of AI in schools, in model and product development, in third-party systems, in service entities and shared services, plus data protection and information security. Forty-eight schools, two jurisdictions, minors' data, and UAE Federal AI Law, GDPR and FERPA requirements.

02

Product & AI Leadership

I take AI from idea to live product at enterprise scale, and my own roadmap is governed by the policy I wrote. At GEMS that means platforms used by more than 140,000 students, parents and educators, built on predictive models, LLMs and modern cloud architecture.

03

Research & Frameworks

My doctoral research studies how AI affects learning and student wellbeing. I have published peer-reviewed work in IEEE and Emerald, and built original frameworks for reasoning about trust and governance in education AI.

04

Mentorship & Social Impact

I mentor founders through Misk Launchpad and Sber, more than fifty across Saudi Arabia and Russia, on AI strategy and go-to-market. I also volunteer with Upllyft, a neurodiversity platform working with the Al Noor Training Centre in the UAE.

Selected work

A few things I have built.

Projects from recent years, at the scale they actually ran.

OpenAI in Abu Dhabi classrooms

Worked with schools to identify the use cases worth building, and partnered with the OpenAI team on the tenancy architecture that enforces group-level policy and access controls across Abu Dhabi schools.

AI governance from zero

Built the AI governance function at GEMS from the ground up. Five policies now mandated across all 48 schools in the UAE and Qatar, covering classroom use, model and product development, third-party systems, shared services, and data protection, with the sub-policies, procedures and a working platform to run them.

AI literacy, not just AI access

Built an AI literacy curriculum for educators and students, so the people using AI understand what it does and where it fails.

Research with reach

Original frameworks including PETAI and TRUSTED, accepted for IEEE and Scopus-indexed publication.

Career

From quality engineering to AI strategy.

The sectors changed across telecom, consulting and education. The work stayed the same. Make complex technology dependable for the people who rely on it.

2019 — Present
Dubai, UAE

Head of Product Management & AI · Head of AI Governance

GEMS Education

Lead product and AI across a portfolio of more than twelve enterprise platforms serving 140,000 active students, parents and educators. Lifted digital adoption by 40 percent, student retention by 18 percent and enrolment conversion by 12 percent by replacing fragmented tools with unified journeys. Cut manual operational work by 40 percent for more than $3M in annual savings, and reduced time-to-market by 20 percent by building and scaling a cross-functional product, data science and AI engineering team. Created the AI governance practice from zero and authored the five policies now mandated across all 48 schools in the UAE and Qatar.

2014 — 2019
Dubai, UAE

Product Launch Manager

Etisalat

Ran national go-to-market for flagship telecom and digital service lines. Accelerated regional launch execution by 30 percent and lifted first-time-right delivery to 95 percent through tight cross-functional readiness. Introduced data-backed positioning and user telemetry that raised customer acquisition and satisfaction by 25 percent.

2013 — 2014
Kuala Lumpur, MY

Technical Solution Consultant

Haastra Consulting

Architected pre-sales solution designs for enterprise telecom and insurance platforms, cutting post-deployment defects by 25 percent and lifting client adoption by 40 percent.

2009 — 2013
Chennai, IN

Associate Test Lead

Maveric Systems

Led quality assurance for global BFSI and telecom programmes and pioneered automated testing frameworks that cut test-cycle defects by 30 percent and delivered 40 percent operational cost savings.

The constant across every role has been one thing. Take technology that is hard to trust and make it dependable for the people on the other side of the screen.

Research & frameworks

The frameworks behind the work.

Doctoral research at SP Jain, with peer-reviewed publications in IEEE and Emerald on AI governance and responsible AI. These are the named frameworks that came out of it.

PETAI

A consent-first model for human and AI teaming, so personalisation never runs ahead of what the learner agreed to.

Emerald · Integrated Intelligence 2026
TRUSTED

A seven-pillar governance framework with a Trustworthy Compliance Index, consolidating the earlier FAIR and PEACE work.

IEEE · Integrated Intelligence 2026
WellScan

A predictive wellbeing model for K-12 in the UAE, and the empirical anchor of the doctorate behind all of this work.

Doctoral study
Pedagogical Hallucination

A study of how AI tutoring fails, what those failures look like in practice, and how to detect them early.

IEEE · World Symposium on AI 2026
The Forgotten Curriculum

A Persistence Score framework for what learning actually survives AI assistance, and whether AI tutors should unlearn.

IEEE · Distance Education 2026
Edge Guardrail

A lightweight on-device guardrail for user-facing LLMs, doing age-aware safety filtering at the edge, not the cloud.

Under review

Six peer-reviewed papers and counting, published through IEEE, Emerald and indexed journals, presented at international conferences on integrated intelligence, artificial intelligence and distance education. Three more are under review: the on-device guardrail above, GATE, a levels-of-oversight framework for delegating pedagogical decisions to classroom AI, and a typology of student trust miscalibration in AI tutors.

Google Scholar ↗
Speaking & recognition

On stages, panels and in the work of founders.

Misk Launchpad & Sber

Startup mentor to 50+ founders across Saudi Arabia and Russia

OutSystems Low-Code AI Summit

Panellist on AI in low-code development

Digital Confex, Dubai

Speaker on the future of education and responsible AI

Dubai AI & Web3 Dialogue

Roundtable on AI governance and smart cities

CXO Roundtable

Cloud cost optimisation and AI governance

State of AI in 2025

Panellist on AI beyond the hype
Let's talk

Get in touch.

Based in Dubai. Open to conversations about AI governance, product leadership, advisory and research collaboration.