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Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer for Google [X]; international bestselling author of Solve for Happy; host of the hit podcast Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat; founder of the One Billion Happy movement; Chief AI Officer of Flight Story; co-founder of Emma.love, an AI-driven platform exploring human connection and relationships; and author of Scary Smart, as well as additional bestselling titles including That Little Voice in Your Head, Unstressable, and Alive.
Mo has an impressive combined career of over 30 years, starting at IBM Egypt as a Systems Engineer before moving to a sales role in the government sector.
Venturing into the UAE, Mo joined NCR Abu Dhabi to cover the non-finance sector. He then became acquainted with the consumer goods industry as Regional Manager of BAT. At Microsoft, he assumed various roles over a span of seven and a half years, eventually heading the Communications Sector across Emerging Markets worldwide.
Mo Gawdat joined Google in 2007 to kick-start its business in Emerging Markets.
He is fascinated by the role that technology plays in empowering people in emerging communities and has dedicated years of his career towards that passion. Over a period of six years, Mo started close to half of GoogleтАЩs operations worldwide.
In 2013, Mo moved to GoogleтАЩs innovation arm, Google [X], as Chief Business Officer, where he led the business strategy, planning, sales, business development and partnerships.
Google [X] does not attempt to achieve incremental improvements in the way the world works, but instead, it develops new technologies that aim to reinvent the way things are and deliver a radical tenfold improvement.
This has led to projects such as Project Loon, which aimed to use high-altitude balloons to provide affordable internet access to billions of people; Project Makani, which explored revolutionising wind energy generation using autonomous carbon fibre kites; as well as self-driving cars, Google Life Sciences, and more.
The business team under MoтАЩs leadership designed innovative business models aligned with the disruptive technologies [X] created, forming deep partnerships and global deals that enabled the organisation to thrive and build products fit for the real world.
Alongside his career, Mo Gawdat has remained a serial entrepreneur, co-founding more than 20 businesses across sectors including health and fitness, food and beverage, and real estate. He has served as a board member for several technology, health and fitness, and consumer goods companies, as well as government technology and innovation boards worldwide, and mentors numerous start-ups.
Through 12 years of research on the topic of happiness, Mo and his son Ali developed an algorithm and a repeatable model to achieve a state of uninterrupted happiness, regardless of lifeтАЩs circumstances. In 2014, this model was put to the ultimate test when Mo lost his son Ali to a preventable medical error during a routine surgical procedure.
In an effort to honour Ali and process his loss, Mo wrote his international bestselling book, Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy (2017). The bookтАЩs happiness equation and dedication to Ali form the foundation of MoтАЩs personal mission: to help one billion people become happier (#onebillionhappy).
In 2020, Mo launched his successful podcast, Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat, where he and his guests explore the profound questions and challenges we all face in the pursuit of purpose and happiness.
His book Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World (2021) explores the ethical implications of AI and how humanity can coexist with increasingly intelligent machines. Since the rapid rise of generative AI, Mo has become one of the most globally consulted experts on artificial intelligence, recognised for his early warnings about its unregulated development and its impact on humanity.
In 2022, Mo published That Little Voice in Your Head, a guide to understanding and optimising the human mind, followed by Unstressable (2024), a number one Amazon bestseller co-authored with Alice Law, which offers a practical framework for eliminating unhealthy stress. His latest work, Alive, explores the profound implications of artificial intelligence on human existence and what it means to be alive in an increasingly intelligent world.
