Careem co-founder Magnus Olsson shares lessons on AI, entrepreneurship, and purpose with MBZUAI community

Careem is one of the Middle East’s defining tech success stories. Founded in 2012, the Dubai-based company grew from an aspiring ride-hailing service into the region’s first unicorn and today operates as an ‘everything app,’ offering transport, food delivery, payments, and more to millions of users across 15 markets.

The company made global headlines in 2019 when it was aquired by Uber for $3.1 billion, which remains the Middle East’s biggest tech deal. In 2023, its everything app business spun out, with new backing from e& – keeping the brand firmly rooted as a homegrown champion and startup inspiration for a genertion of entrepreneurs. In fact, hundreds of former employees have gone on to launch their own ventures across the region.

A key part of the Careem journey has been its application of artificial intelligence – and the man who knows that story better than anyone is Magnus Olsson, Careem’s co-founder and now its Chief AI Officer.

Olsson recently visited MBZUAI and spent time with students and researchers at our Incubation and Entrepreneurship Center, where he shared how AI is driving Careem’s growth and offered practical advice for aspiring entrepreneurs – primarily the importance of solving a problem.

“Start with real problems, not with the technology,” he told the audience during the fireside chat.  “One of the surest ways to fail as an entrepreneur is to have a technology or a solution, but not really know what it’s for. You have to start with identifying very clearly who is the customer and what problem you are solving for them.”

He illustrated this point with the story of an AI startup that built a general personal assistant tool but only found success after narrowing its focus to helping parents manage school communications. “Same technology, but a very specific use case.”

Olsson urged those working on cutting-edge models and applications that could be translated into business solutions to embed themselves with potential users, in order to truly understand their needs. “You cannot figure it out from far away. You need to be in there.”

He also challenged students to think about what drives them. Too often, he said, people operate out of fear or a mindset of scarcity. Instead, he advised aspiring entrepreneurs to replace fear with curiosity and survival with purpose.

“The best thing you can do is to figure out what you really care about, what you’re really passionate about, what you feel your purpose is,” he said. “If you work on that, magic things will happen.”

How AI is supercharging Careem

Reflecting on Careem’s journey and how AI now powers almost every aspect of its operations, Olsson explained the company’s ‘three plus three buckets’ approach that drives their business inwardly and outwardly.

“The first bucket is the products,” he said. “We need to use AI to do better marketplace. We need to do AI to do better payment experience. We need to do AI so you can give you a better recommendation. We need to do AI so we can do it more personalized.

“The second bucket is we need to do AI in the way we work. Within this we consider our tech, customer service, and marketing, as well as the AI our finance team, legal team, and people team are using.

“And then the third main bucket is AI to completely disrupt ourselves. Today we are an everything app, but who knows if we’re going to have apps in the future? Most likely not, right? We will have some agents, and that agent will do stuff for us. So we’re thinking a lot about what the future will look like.

“Then we have three supporting buckets. One is data – we’re investing a lot in data infrasturcture. The second is tooling. And lastly you need to have the right mindsets and literacy.

“So that’s our framework. AI in our products, AI in our organization, AI to completely disrupt ourselves – supported by data, tooling, and mindset.”

To illustrate the impact of this approach, Olsson gave the example of AI in customer service.

“We have 85% of all tickets handled by AI,” he said. “And actually, our customer satisfaction score is higher on the AI-answered tickets than on the human tickets, which is shocking.”

For all the success Careem’s AI strategy has had, however, regional realities have often complicated the journey – and still do – especially when scaling across 15 fragmented markets.

“Traffic in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo is very, very different,” he says. “Captains behave differently, customers behave differently depending on the weather or other local factors. And things change over time in every city. So the actual AI training and the reinforcement learning needs to be done very locally because the markets behave very differently.”

Successful startups need a mix of talent

Among the candid advice Olsson gave during his hour-long conversation was a warning against glorifying the role of ‘founder’ above all others.

“Not everyone needs to be or should be a founder,” he said. “If everyone was just aspiring founders, there would be no companies.” Purpose, he suggested, can be found in many roles – whether as a technical expert, an early employee, or someone applying AI to solve a pressing business challenge. “You need colleagues that join – that become colleague number one, colleague number 10, colleague number 100, that are all saying, hey, I feel I connect to this purpose, I’m going to make it mine, and I’m going to dive in and do it.”

On the theme of teams, and talent, Olsson reflected on the skills Careem seeks as it scales its AI capabilities. On one side are applied problem-solvers who can map business processes and turn them into AI workflows. On the other are deep technical specialists – data scientists and AI engineers who can build and train models. This reflects MBZUAI’s new Undergraduate program which offers two distinct streams – engineering and business – both of which are essential, Olsson said, and neither of which can succeed in isolation.

“For those of you that do the technical track, try to get a little bit of business sense so you can communicate with a business colleague,” he advised the engineering undergraduates. “And for those of you that go on the applied [business] track, just hone your problem-solving skills. That’s it. You don’t have to understand the tech – just apply AI.”

For MBZUAI’s community of researchers and aspiring entrepreneurs, the message was clear: world-class training, regional opportunity, and AI expertise are already in their hands. What matters next is courage, curiosity, and a willingness to turn purpose into action.

Olsson’s final piece of advice focused on advice that his co-founder – Mudassir Sheikha – received from his headmaster while at school.

“His headmaster said, life is like a rowing boat. You sit in this rowing boat, and you have two oars. One oar is hard work, and one oar is blessings and prayer, or whatever belief system you have. And you need both. If you just work really hard, you’ll just go around in circles. And if you just sit and pray for something great to happen, but you’re not really willing to put in the work, then you just go around in the other way.

“You need both – I really believe in that. You need to apply yourself, you need to commit, push yourself, dig in. But at the same time know that we are instruments of something bigger. So find what is in there, and then just let it come out of you.”