Dubai based AI & communications strategist Shadi Dawi has earned his Doctorate of Business Administration with Premium Distinction from ESC Clermont School of Business in France, concluding two years of intensive research and preparation that ended in what jury members called one of the strongest defences the programme has witnessed.
His dissertation, titled “AI Truth”: A Framework for Governing AI Generated Content in UAE Corporate Communications, confronts a problem most organizations now live with but few have solved. Generative AI drafts press releases, executive statements, and crisis communications at a pace no editorial process was designed to match. Production has accelerated while verification has stood still, exposing companies to factual errors, cultural missteps, and disclosure failures at precisely the moment public trust in corporate AI use is at its most fragile. In the UAE, where corporate messaging often carries national reputation weight and the UAE AI Charter calls for transparency and human oversight, the stakes are higher still.
Dawi’s answer is a practitioner ready governance framework built on four pillars: Data Accuracy and Verification, Cultural Resonance and Bias Mitigation, Moral Governance and Disclosure, and Signal over Flooding. The framework was validated through a mixed methods study combining a survey of 160 UAE communications professionals with fifteen senior executive interviews, anchoring it in the realities of the region’s boardrooms rather than in theory alone.
The three member jury praised the work in unusually direct terms. His defense presentation was described as the best the committee had ever reviewed, and the school intends to preserve it as a reference template for future doctoral candidates. The examiners also encouraged Dawi to publish his findings in indexed scientific journals, a clear signal that the research is expected to travel well beyond the defense room.
With this award, Dawi becomes the most recent DBA holder in the region to specialize in artificial intelligence with a dedicated focus on content creation and the governance of large language models within the corporate communications sector.
For a region that has staked its future on responsible AI leadership, the timing could hardly be better. As Dawi put it during his defense, the question is no longer whether organizations will use AI. It is whether they can be trusted when they do.
