Sapiency · the operations, data & AI practice of Ahmad Alawami
The
Ledger
One engagement, fully accounted for. The twelfth Saudi Film Festival needed a guest list it could run on, and did not have one. What follows is the record of the seven weeks that fixed that — with every number carrying its evidence status, the way every number should.
Scroll to open the record
Entry I
Six forms, no list
The Kingdom's oldest film festival — 314 submissions, 50 films screened, held at Ithra in Dhahran — was registering guests through six separate sign-up forms, each with its own manual routine. Registration, hosting, messaging, and ceremony access all needed one reliable list. It did not exist.
Larger festivals rent this capability from production companies or event platforms. Working through Sapiency, I built it instead — from an empty sheet, while the festival was already in motion.
- Sign-up forms, before6M
- Forms, after — bilingual, conditional1M
- Conditional rules it carries14M
Entry II
One governed master
Seven weeks, May to July 2026. The guest operation ran off an eighteen-sheet system feeding a daily bilingual arrivals-and-departures pipeline, rebuilt around twenty to thirty times across the festival week. Own-car and no-reception guests were excluded from pickups automatically; the airline was derived from the flight number.
- Records in the master771M
- Of them, guests619M
- Accreditation classes10M
- Fields per record40+M
- Sheets in the system18M
Entry III
The quality layer
Automation laid over an unstable foundation industrializes the instability, so the checks came before the machinery. An automated layer of eleven checks across three severity levels ran against the whole master — roughly 700 people, more than forty fields — and surfaced 712 issues in a single pass.
A standing guardrails document governed every edit to live, shared data: find columns by header, target rows by identifier, confirm before overwriting, read back afterwards. A dozen people kept working without breaking what was built.
- Automated checks11M
- Severity levels3M
- Issues surfaced, one pass712M
Entry IV
Matched, not guessed
Record matching scored candidates on how many attributes agreed. Anything doubtful was flagged for a human rather than guessed. Against the opening-ceremony source, the reconciliation came back 330 clean of 335. A filmmaker list was merged with every one of its 32 emails cross-checked; 328 cells were filled, and none were invented.
- Clean match, ceremony source99% — 330 of 335M
- Cells filled in the merge328M
- Cells invented0M
Entry V
A list you can reach
Contact coverage was rebuilt from almost nothing. A logged mail-merge carried roughly 714 personalized bilingual messages — 141 invitations across four waves, 158 hosting messages, 415 ceremony passes — by email and by WhatsApp, with anyone who had declined removed from the send list automatically. The live dashboard put every figure one click from the row it came from.
- Phone coverage~90%M
- Email coverage~66%M
- Messages sent, logged≈714M
- Ceremony passes issued415M
Entry VI
What it was worth
Value falls into two registers, because only one of them is countable. On the countable tasks — the messages, the manifests, the reporting the dashboard replaced — the saving is on the order of one to two weeks of full-time work. That figure is an estimate with its arithmetic shown, and it is written as an estimate every time it appears.
The larger saving sits in the matching, deduplication, and validation: done by hand to the same standard, weeks more — and parts of it not realistically doable by hand at all.
- Saving on countable tasks1–2 weeks FTEE
- Improvement in completeness80%W
- Reduction in errors67%W
The two struck figures appeared in early drafts of this record. They could not be substantiated, so they were withdrawn — by me, from my own account of my own work. A number that collapses under a client's question costs more than it ever earned. That is the standard the rest of this page is held to.
Entry VII
Signed off
“Ahmad's attention to detail, elegance, and instinct for the optimal path show in every piece of his work. What he built quietly took weight off the rest of the team — rarely flashy or out front, but consistently the thing that kept the operation moving. His data and AI skills are exceptional. I couldn't have chosen a better person for this job.”
The engagement is complete. The festival closed with 51 production-market deals worth over four million riyals; its guest operation ran on one list, and the list held.