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Event Executive. Advisor. Founder of AKUGGI. Based in the UAE, working across the GCC.

A.J. Amer |

London South Bank University - BSc,
International Business & Finance
American Intercontinental University London - BBA
Business Administration
Harvard Business School Online
Certificate, Global Business
Harvard Kennedy School - edX
Exercising Leadership

Education & Certifications

2025 – Present: RICHARD ATTIAS AND ASSOCIATES
Dubai, UAE
Chief of Staff to the Global CEO, then Managing Director, UAE

The move to Richard Attias & Associates came through headhunting. I had not been looking, but the offer was the kind that warrants serious consideration: Chief of Staff to the Global CEO of one of the most established advisory and event-design firms in the world. The role gave me access to the executive level of a global business in a way no other role would have. I took it.

As Chief of Staff, I was the operational right hand of the CEO. I supported the executive agenda across global priorities and milestones, coordinated the work of the executive team, and held responsibility for ensuring that client commitments were delivered on time and within budget. I also led the review of corporate policies and procedures across the international offices, with the mandate of aligning them globally so that the standards were consistent, comprehensible, and enforceable across markets.

After a period as Chief of Staff, I was promoted to Managing Director, UAE, with full P&L ownership of the regional office and a team of more than forty across delivery, programme, and partnerships. The remit covered our international team based in the UAE, travelling continuously to execute events across Europe, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Sovereign portfolio. High-stakes corporate clients. The kind of work where the brief, the room, and the timeline reach you all at once.

The body of work spanned flagship convenings, multilateral forums, and bespoke executive programmes for clients across the region. I supported the Bridge Summit alongside the project director, coordinating directly with the National Media Office, and led a portfolio of additional projects across the GCC except KSA. On the commercial side, I built a network of framework agreements with key service providers, leveraging long-standing relationships across the region to deliver the best terms for the firm and the most reliable execution for clients.

In 2026, I led the design of a new commercial model for the regional office: a zero-retainer, commission-based agency alliance bringing together international, GCC, and regional partners under a single coordinated framework. The model removed fixed overhead from the partnerships side of the business while expanding reach and bench depth across the region. It represented a structural evolution of how a high-end event design firm operates in this market.

Richard Attias & Associates is where the executive practice came together. Global business exposure at the CEO level. Regional managing director responsibility with full P&L. A sovereign client portfolio. A network of partners and providers built over years of working at the top of the regional market. It is the chapter that defined the shape of what comes next.

MY Journey

English Native
Arabic Native

LANGUAGES

2015 – 2017: DISTILLERY DISTRICT / STIRLING ROOM
Toronto, Canada
Director of Operations, Events.

The next opportunity was a wrap party. Toronto 2015 ended at The Stirling Room in the Distillery District, where the team celebrated the close of the Games over a long night. I got talking with the owner. I told him about the work I had been doing at the Games, the production background, the kind of operations I had been running. He listened, and a few weeks later, he offered me a job.

The mandate was unusual. He wanted to transform The Stirling Room from a restaurant and bar into a full event space, and he wanted someone with production and operations experience to lead the conversion. The title was Director of Event Operations, but the responsibility was effectively that of a General Manager. He handed me the keys and let me run it.

It was the first time I had full P&L ownership of a business. I built the venue decks, drew up the floor plans, designed the entertainment calendar, structured the programming, ran the production operations, hired the team, trained the team, and managed the permits. Twelve full-time staff across bartenders, security, bar backs, cleaners, musicians, and bouncers. Thirty to forty freelancers on rotation. Sales, administration, and marketing all reporting in. A business with the operational complexity of a venue twice its size.

The owner was a master salesman. Three decades in the industry, instincts honed in rooms most people will never see, and a willingness to bring me into the closing conversations and let me learn. I sat across the table from him while he negotiated framework agreements, watched him handle resistance, and absorbed the rhythm of how good business development actually happens. By the end, I was closing my own contracts. That mentorship was the half of the job that didn't appear in any document.

The work itself was where I first built original IP from scratch. Our own Christmas market, programmed in coordination with the Distillery District's seasonal calendar. A weekly jazz night that became a fixture. Custom events for CBC, Publicis, Microsoft, film studios, weddings, ultra-high-net-worth individuals private bookings, and the occasional private celebrity celebration. Every concept was ours to design, every booking was ours to deliver, and every detail of execution came down to the small team running the floor.

The Stirling Room was where I crossed the line from coordinator and manager to executive. Not because of the title, but because of the responsibility. P&L, people, programming, sales, hiring, the permits. The full operating stack. Mega-events had taught me how to coordinate. This taught me how to run a business.

ABOUT ME

2008 – Current: AKUGGI
GLOBAL, Currently in the GCC
Founder

AKUGGI was born where most good ideas are: in the cracks between university lectures and London weekends. The year was 2008. I was a student, working hard during the week and spending time in the city's music and entertainment venues on the weekends like every twenty-something with disposable income and the energy to spend it. The difference, looking back, is that I started watching what worked and what didn't.

The pattern was obvious once you noticed it, especially from inside it. I was the demographic I was watching: young, working hard, ready to spend on a weekend out. The venues that thrived weren't necessarily the most beautiful, the best-located, or the most expensively designed. They were the ones with energy. The ones where something was happening. A live jazz set in the corner. A magician working table to table. A roving performer turning a quiet room into a destination. The venues that didn't work had the same fixtures, the same furniture, sometimes even better food, and were missing only one thing: entertainment.

That observation became AKUGGI. I started connecting musicians, magicians, jazz players, and roaming performers to the venues that needed them. The pitch was simple. Better entertainment drives footfall. Footfall drives food and beverage. The venue ends up paying for the talent through the revenue the talent creates. The first client was a small London music and entertainment venue called the British Luxury Club, where I tested the model and proved it worked. When it worked there, it could work anywhere. From there came China White, Maddox, Amika, Pangea, and eventually the Hyde Park Festival, where AKUGGI delivered roaming entertainment programming across one of London's biggest outdoor moments of the year.

I ran AKUGGI through the rest of university and fell in love with the work. Walking away from it after graduation was only because the next chapter of the career took me to Doha, then Toronto, then Dubai, where the venues got bigger but the principle stayed the same. People will pay almost anything for the right experience. The work is figuring out what the right experience is.

18 years later, AKUGGI is back.

The brand has returned with a different mission for a different industry, but the underlying belief is exactly the same: support people in having a more pleasurable experience, whether that experience is a night out or a day at work. Today's AKUGGI is an AI-native software studio, building tools for the people who plan, produce, and run live events. The flagship products are in their final phase of development and launch publicly in mid-2026. A select group of clients is already operating with the prototypes. The apps cut planning time, organize complex operations, and let teams juggle multiple events at once without dropping a single thread.

There is also a second arm. Prompt engineering is the new operational skill, and most teams haven't yet learned to use it well. AKUGGI is building a learning platform, with classes and an education programme designed to help companies and their teams keep pace with how fast AI is moving. The point is to equip the people working inside organizations to use these tools, not to be replaced by them.

The form has changed. The instinct hasn't. In 2008, the gap was live entertainment for nightlife venues. Today, it is intelligent software and AI capability for event professionals. Different industry, different decade, same impulse: find the gap between what something is and what it could be, and fill it with the right thing.

Watch this space.

2010 – 2011: PAN ARAB GAMES 2011
Doha, Qatar
Project Coordinator, Event Wide Coordination Office

The first proper job out of university came through a professor. He pulled me aside after class one day, told me the Qatar Olympic Committee was building an event-wide planning team for the 2011 Pan Arab Games, and said the role sounded like me. Months later, I was in Doha.

The title was Project Coordinator, sitting inside what we would now call a PMO office, although the language wasn't yet common. The work was event-wide coordination across every internal stakeholder at the Qatar Olympic Committee and every external one outside it. Police. Fire. Emergency services. Protocol teams. National Olympic Committees from across the Arab world. Every department, every contractor, every authority that touched the games at any stage, from test events through to the closing ceremony.

I ran the main operations center. The job was to know, at any given moment, what was happening, who was responsible for which milestone, and where the next bottleneck was about to form. The role gave me the kind of exposure to high-level civil service leaders, protocol officers, and executives across every vertical of the games that became the standard I have measured every senior room against since.

The biggest difference, though, was my manager. She was a seasoned executive who had run multiple Olympic Games and major sporting events across her career, and she led the team the way you would expect someone with her track record to lead it: with precision, without ego, with an instinct for what mattered and what didn't. Working for her was an education in itself. I learned more in those months under her than I had in all of university combined.

The other thing I learned, and the one that has shaped everything since, is that mega-events at this scale are not logistics. They are diplomacy. The cultural protocol, the political register, the unspoken hierarchy of who is in the room and who is not, all of it decides outcomes long before any production decision is made. Doha was where that became obvious for the first time. It has been the through-line of every chapter since.

2012 – 2014: CITY OF TORONTO
Toronto, Canada
Program Assistant, Occupational Health & Safety, Human Resources

After Doha, I came home. Toronto was where my family had settled, and where the next chapter of my career was going to happen even though I didn't know what shape it would take yet. The first role that came along was inside the City of Toronto, as Program Assistant in the Occupational Health and Safety Department within Human Resources. It was not the event's job. But it became one of the most important roles I have ever taken.

For two and a half years, I worked alongside city veterans who knew occupational health and safety inside and out. I studied the Green Book page by page until it became second nature. I sat across from civil service employees as they navigated injury claims, return-to-work cases, and the bureaucratic mechanics of getting back on their feet. I learned how health and safety officers think, what they look for, and what they expect from the people running operations in their jurisdiction.

The connection to events came earlier than I expected. The Toronto 2015 Pan American Games were being planned in the same building. The hallway conversations, the briefings I overheard, the people I started recognizing in the cafeteria, all of it told me the next big chapter was being built around me. The interest never left.

What I took from those years was not glamorous. It was foundational. Every venue I have walked since, every show I have run, every risk plan I have signed off on, sits on top of an HSSE foundation built in that office. Knowing how a health and safety officer reads a site is not something you can fake in a meeting. It is something you absorb by spending years around people who do it for a living. The Pan Am Games came next, and I arrived already speaking the language.

2014 – 2015: PAN AMERICAN AND PARAPAN AMERICAN GAMES
Toronto, Canada
Deputy Manager, Ceremonies.; Game time: BOH Operations Manager, Ceremonial Venues

The Pan Am Games were the job I had been waiting for without knowing it. After two and a half years watching the Toronto 2015 organizing committee work in the same building, I joined them as Deputy Manager of Ceremonies Planning. By the time the Games arrived, I was Production Operations Manager during games time, running back-of-house operations across the ceremony venues.

The scope was the largest I had touched up to that point. The main Pan Am opening and closing ceremonies were at the Rogers Centre. Panamania, the fan zone festival programme, ran at Nathan Phillips Square. The Parapan opening and closing followed once the Pan Am Games closed. I managed the coordination across all of it: timing, logistics, partner liaison, and the daily mechanics of getting hundreds of people in the right place at the right time.

The back-of-house chair was the seat I learned the most in. My role was to be the point of contact between the organizing committee and the production partners: Cirque du Soleil, B5C, and Live Nation. The coordination work was minute by minute. Rehearsal blocks. Sound checks. Performer movements. Pyrotechnic alignment with the CN Tower for the moment when the fireworks would launch over downtown Toronto, timed to the second against what was happening inside the Rogers Centre. Some of the most precise event execution I have ever been part of, working with some of the most talented production people in the world.

The team itself was what made the experience. I worked with six project coordinators and more than two hundred volunteers, building out everything from venue training and ushering protocols to security positioning with police, ticket takers, event services, and the staff training across every position in every venue. We coordinated the athletes' ingress and egress between the Athletes' Village and the ceremony venues, running every movement against curfew schedules to make sure athletes were back in time to rest before competition. Every detail of the agenda, the production schedule, and the daily run sheet had a name attached to it, and the names made it work.

Toronto 2015 was one of the most comprehensive mega-events I have ever worked. It was also one of the most joyful. The people I worked with then are still colleagues, friends, and connections today. The fireworks from the CN Tower at the opening ceremony, watched by a full Rogers Centre and a city that had waited years for the Games to come home, is still one of the cleanest production moments I have ever been part of. Some events you remember for the scale. Some you remember for the people. This one was both.

2017 – 2021: INFORMA / FAN EXPO HQ
Toronto, Canada
Head of Operations

The next move was Informa, and the scope of the work changed permanently. I joined Informa Connect as Head of Operations for the Fan Expo HQ portfolio: the largest collection of pop culture and Comic Con events in North America, spanning eleven shows across the United States and Canada. To this day, one of the favourite jobs I have ever worked.

The portfolio was a touring operation in the form of an exhibition business. MegaCon Orlando, MegaCon Tampa Bay, Fan Expo Dallas, Dallas Fan Days, Fan Expo Boston (the show formerly known as Boston Comic Con), Fan Expo Vancouver, Fan Expo Canada in Toronto, Toronto Comicon, Calgary Expo, Edmonton Expo, and Fan Expo Regina. The venues were some of the most advanced convention centers in the world: the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, where we occupied both the north and south buildings, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, and the Vancouver Convention Centre.

I led a core operations team of six (operations managers, senior operations managers, and coordinators) and managed roughly 300 volunteers across the portfolio at any given time. The remit covered every operational layer of a major exhibition: logistics, warehouse operations, transportation, staffing, dot mapping, security contracts, ingress and egress, and the full mechanics of getting up to 250,000 attendees per day through a venue safely. We delivered the events at scale while simultaneously planning the next ones, which is the rhythm of touring exhibitions: you are always mid-build on something while mid-strike on something else. That cadence taught me how to multitask in a way no other job has.

The commercial side mattered just as much. Across my four years, I redesigned the floor plans at Orlando and Tampa, accelerating ingress and egress by 200% and unlocking 25% more exhibitor space, which drove material incremental revenue. We negotiated more than 100 supplier contracts annually, built a framework agreement system that compared costs across cities, and switched from flying supplies between markets to storing them locally in each city, which cut significant costs out of the operation. Across those four years, we grew revenue 21% year over year, reduced the cost base by 7%, and lifted attendee satisfaction scores from 6.3 to 8.8.

The work crossed every function. We coordinated security deployment and VIP routing for celebrity talent, ran temporary staff hiring and scheduling across the entire show portfolio, worked with the marketing team on collateral and technical specs for our stages, and built show floor creative directly with the show decorators and the CEO. I learned an entirely new vocabulary of exhibitions and conferences and added it to the mega-event one I had already.

What defined the experience, though, was the people. Most of my four years were spent with the same team across multiple cities, multiple build-outs, and multiple late nights. Leadership at this scale is less about having authority and more about being someone people want to do a hard job with. I did not start the role as a pop culture fan. I finished it deeply in love with the industry, the company, and the culture the team had built.

2022 – 2025: EXPO CITY DUBAI
Dubai, UAE
Director, Live Entertainment and Production

When Expo 2020 closed, I was offered the role I had been waiting for. Expo City Dubai was the legacy entity being built on top of the Expo 2020 site, and I joined as employee number six. The role at the start was Head of Production. Within months, I was promoted to Director of Entertainment and Production. Over the next three years, this became the job closest to my heart of any I have ever held.

The mandate was unusual at this stage of a career: build the production function from scratch for an organization that was building everything from scratch. I had a team of four full-time employees and a roster of service providers, and we recreated the entire production department to serve what would eventually be renamed the Entertainment and Experiences division. Temporary structures. Original IP from the ground up. The full production blueprint behind the concepts our Executive Creative Officer was designing, brought into the physical world.

The IP catalogue tells the story. Winter City became the flagship, the Christmas-season programme that turned into a fixture on Dubai's calendar. Hai Ramadan, the original Ramadan activation we built for Expo City and the wider community. The Chinese New Year Parade, where I served as Executive Producer alongside Dubai Tourism and HALA China, and which delivered the largest Chinese New Year parade ever held outside of China. UNTOLD Music Festival, which we hosted in partnership with Dubai Tourism and the festival's original organizers, and which became one of the largest international music festivals delivered in the region. Across all of it, I was the production lead coordinating between the entire Expo City organization, the client side, and every external authority that touched the work.

The peak was the COP28 Presidential Dinner, and it became the proof point for one of the most valuable skills the region taught me: how to deliver against impossible timelines. The Dinner was handed to the team ten days before the event. The President of the United Arab Emirates, His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, hosted the President of Brazil and the First Lady, with more than 250 heads of state, ministers, and dignitaries in the room. Most of the décor was built from scratch, with key creative assets flown in from Brazil to honour the visiting delegation. We delivered a fully immersive experience that ran from a custom entrance built off Al Wasl Plaza through to the cascading waterfall setting where the dinner itself was held, covering every layer of the production: technical, food and beverage, service, transportation, and citywide coordination for safety, security, and white-glove protocol. State guests at that level do not notice production. They notice when it fails. The job was to make sure they had nothing to notice.

There was also a great deal of infrastructure work running underneath the IP. We built the stadium seating inside Al Wasl Plaza for major events, coordinated with civil engineers on the demolition and repurposing of existing structures, and led the production build of Al Wasl Café and the surrounding plaza. The legacy site was being defined in real time, and the production decisions made in those rooms became part of the permanent physical fabric of Expo City Dubai.

Expo City was the chapter where mega-event production work became sovereign-level production work. Three years of original IP from blank page, sovereign-grade events, and the slow build of a permanent home for live entertainment in this part of the world. It is also, looking back, the chapter of the career that means the most to me.

2021 – 2022: EXPO 2020 DUBAI
Dubai, UAE
Senior Manager, Production Operations.

The return to the Gulf had been a conversation for years before it became a decision. Contacts from Toronto 2015 had been recruiting me to Expo 2020 since well before the pandemic. When the world paused in 2020, the timing finally aligned, and I made the move. I had spent fifteen years building toward an event of this scale in this part of the world, with the cultural and linguistic fluency the work demanded. December 2020 was the right time to act on it.

I moved to Dubai and joined Expo 2020 in January 2021. The mandate at the start was ceremonies at Al Wasl Plaza, the central dome of the Expo. Within weeks, the senior leadership team saw the broader value: bilingual in English and Arabic, deeply versed in mega-event delivery at scale, and culturally fluent in the GCC. The role expanded quickly. I was promoted to Senior Manager, Production Operations, for the public realm across the entire Expo site: more than a thousand acres of programming, activations, and ceremonies delivered across six months of continuous operation.

The initial focus was the Sustainability District, but the remit grew with every cycle of the event calendar. I managed the contractors delivering the daily parade. I was the point of contact for every GCC country event. I led production across the entertainment venues and spaces inside the Thematic Districts. National Day activations, the Winter City Christmas season programme, the Jubilee Park stage, and the thematic district stages across the site all came through the team. Prior to opening, I worked closely with the technical teams and contractors on the construction and progress management of the stages themselves, from concept through commissioning.

The partner roster read like a master list of the live entertainment world. Underbelly. Flash Entertainment. David Atkins Enterprises. Architects of Air. We delivered roaming entertainment, aerial displays, parachute jumps, horse and animal processions, and pyrotechnic coordination across the GCC National Days held outside Al Wasl Plaza. Each country brought its own protocol expectations, its own pavilion programme, and its own creative direction. The work was as much diplomacy as production: managing the relationships between pavilion attendees, sovereign delegations, local authorities, and the contractors delivering the live elements.

In parallel, I worked with international partners on the light arts activations across the site and contributed to the legacy reporting and project handover documentation submitted to the BIE on completion. Twenty-four million visitors. Six months of continuous activation. The largest world expo ever held in the region.

Expo 2020 was the convergence point. Mega-event coordination from Doha. HSSE from Toronto. The leadership stack from Pan Am. The general management chops from The Stirling Room. The portfolio-scale exhibition rhythm from Fan Expo. All of it came together at Expo 2020 Dubai. By the time the closing ceremony ended, I knew the next chapter of the career was going to happen here, not back in North America.

It started in London in 2008. A student between lectures, working the nightlife circuit from Camden to Mayfair, placing musicians and magicians into venues that needed energy. The first venture was AKUGGI. The lesson was simple: people will pay almost anything for the right experience, and the work is figuring out what the right experience is. Two decades later, that is still the job.

Born in Kuwait, schooled in England, sharpened in Canada, anchored once again in the Gulf. The career has run from the Pan Arab Games in Doha through the Toronto Pan American Games, 4 years and 10 North American cities with the Fan Expo HQ portfolio at Informa, into Expo 2020 Dubai with its 24 million visitors, and through Expo City Dubai, where the brief included the COP28 Head of State Dinner with the President of the United Arab Emirates and
more than 250 dignitaries in the room. Today, it continues at Richard Attias & Associates as Managing Director, UAE. AKUGGI returns in 2026 as an
AI-native software studio for event professionals.

The work has two modes, and I love both. The first is the headset, the black shirt, jeans on a build day. Radio chatter. A walk-through with the security lead. The second is the well-cut suit, the black tie, the chair across from a Minister or a Chief Executive. The careful read of a room before a single creative decision gets made.

The advantage is not language fluency or passport count. It is the ability to read a room across registers in real time, and to design experiences that resonate with the people inside them rather than function around them.

What follows is the long version. 2 decades. 4 continents.

Many headsets.