VAIY/About
About
VAIY is a commercial AI consultancy in Dubai.
We rebuild marketing, sales and commercial operations around AI: the strategy, the training of the teams who will run it afterwards, and the systems where something genuinely needs building. We then hand the work back and leave.
The practice was founded by Robyn Vey, formerly Chief Commercial Officer of a €180 million European group, and it works with organisations across the United Arab Emirates and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council.
Founder
A commercial career first, and a technical one alongside it.
- Executive Diploma in Artificial Intelligence for Business
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford - Chief Commercial Officer, Stephex Group
€180M automotive, equestrian and lifestyle group - Head of Growth, Aventus Network
enterprise blockchain infrastructure
“Commercial judgement and technical capability rarely reside in the same place. Almost everything useful in this field happens where the two overlap.”Robyn Vey, Founder
Robyn Vey has spent her career on the commercial side of businesses that sell complicated things to demanding buyers: luxury goods, automotive, equestrian and technology. She was most recently Chief Commercial Officer of Stephex Group, a €180 million European group, where she built the commercial function for a market the business had not previously operated in, and grew revenue by 143.75% and profit by 32% in the course of doing so. Earlier work included negotiating and running commercial partnerships with Rolex, Audi and Hermès across international markets.
She has also worked from the other side of the table, in technology and blockchain ventures and as founder of an AI venture of her own, specifying systems and getting them into use rather than commissioning them and waiting. Her first degree was in architecture, at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, which is a less unusual route into commercial strategy than it appears: both disciplines are concerned with what a structure has to do before they are concerned with what it is made of.
She holds the Executive Diploma in Artificial Intelligence for Business from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and the framework used throughout VAIY's work - the four independent levels at which AI can be applied to an organisation - is drawn from it.
Very few people advising on artificial intelligence have carried responsibility for revenue, and very few of those who have carried revenue have built software. The useful work sits in the overlap between the two, and that is the whole of the reason this practice exists.
Robyn is based in Dubai and leads every engagement personally. Her full professional record is available on LinkedIn.
Robyn was the only person on my executive team who could both make the commercial case for a new system and specify what it actually had to do. What she put in place was still in use by the team long after she had left.
- Alan M.V., Chief Executive Officer, Aventus NetworkHow we work
Five positions that shape every engagement.
These are not values in the decorative sense. Each of them changes what we will and will not agree to do, and each has cost us work at some point.
-
01
The engagement is designed to end
We set the strategy, rebuild the workflows carrying the most cost, and train the people who will run them afterwards. Then there is a documented handover and we leave. An arrangement that depends on the consultant remaining has transferred nothing, and across three years it costs a great deal more than one that did. We remain available for occasional review, and several clients use us that way, but the work is not constructed so that it has to continue.
-
02
The commercial question comes before the technology
We establish where the cost actually sits in a function before considering what might be applied to it. That sequence produces a shorter recommendation than the reverse, and a considerably cheaper one, because the majority of what could be built should not be.
-
03
Everything is measured against a baseline taken first
Hours on the target workflows, cost per output, and outsourced expenditure, recorded before anything changes and measured again four to six weeks afterwards. A claim about a result, made without a figure recorded beforehand, is not a claim worth making. The comparison is drawn in your figures rather than in ours.
-
04
We are not tied to any vendor
There are no reseller relationships, no referral arrangements and no commission on anything we recommend. A significant proportion of the advice available in this market comes from organisations that sell the systems they advise on, and a recommendation made under those conditions is worth reading differently.
-
05
We will say when there is not enough in it
Some functions are already close to where they should be, and some organisations need a technical consultancy rather than a commercial one. We say so in the first conversation rather than the third. This is the position that has cost us the most work, and it is also the reason the thirty-minute conversation is worth having.
The practice
Who does the work
VAIY is a small senior team of commercial strategists and developers rather than a large firm with a pyramid beneath it. Robyn leads every engagement personally, and the people you deal with during an engagement are the people who scoped it.
Where a strategy requires something built - an internal assistant trained on your own products and past proposals, an integration between the CRM and the marketing platform, an automated reporting layer - our own developers build it. That matters because the recommendation and the implementation then originate in the same place, rather than the analysis being handed to a third party who was not present for it.
Where we work
Dubai, across the United Arab Emirates, and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council including Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Training and strategy sessions are delivered online, which keeps a team working inside its own systems throughout, allows a cohort to be drawn from more than one office, and makes a follow-up review straightforward to arrange rather than a second visit. Because the work consists of rebuilding the systems a team already uses, it is conducted where those systems are, which is at each participant's own desk. All work is conducted in English.
Who we work with
Organisations of roughly fifty people upwards with a commercial function large enough that the work inside it can be counted: large corporates and retail groups, family businesses and luxury houses, and established small and medium-sized enterprises. The common characteristic is not sector or size but that somebody is accountable for a number and can see that the cost of producing the work behind it has changed.
What we do not do
We do not provide technology strategy, data platform architecture or machine-learning engineering, and where that is what an organisation needs we say so early. We do not take permanent retainers as the basis of an engagement. We do not recommend building something where configuring what you already hold will do, since a system that was not required is the most expensive item an organisation can buy in this field.
The whole idea
We set the strategy, train the teams, and then we leave.
An arrangement that depends on the consultant remaining has transferred nothing, and across three years it costs a great deal more than one that did. Everything rebuilt during an engagement is documented as it is built, the prompt libraries stay with the people who use them, and every item in the plan carries a named owner inside your organisation rather than inside ours.
Common questions
What people ask about the practice itself.
What is VAIY?
VAIY is a commercial AI consultancy based in Dubai, working with organisations across the United Arab Emirates and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council. It rebuilds marketing, sales and commercial operations around artificial intelligence, through three services that are ordinarily taken in sequence: a commercial AI strategy, team training conducted on the client's own work, and the rebuilding of the workflows carrying the most cost. It was founded in 2026 by Robyn Vey, formerly Chief Commercial Officer of a €180 million European group.
Who is Robyn Vey?
Robyn Vey is the founder of VAIY. She has spent her career on the commercial side of businesses selling complicated products to demanding buyers, across luxury goods, automotive, equestrian and technology, most recently as Chief Commercial Officer of Stephex Group, where she grew revenue by 143.75% and profit by 32% in a market the business had not previously operated in. She has also worked in technology and blockchain ventures and founded an AI venture of her own, and she holds the Executive Diploma in Artificial Intelligence for Business from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. She is based in Dubai and leads every VAIY engagement personally.
Is VAIY a training company or a consultancy?
It is a consultancy in which training is one of three services, and the reason training features so prominently is that capability which does not remain with the client after the engagement has not been transferred. A strategy that nobody in the organisation is equipped to carry out is a document rather than a change. Equally, training delivered before the commercial leadership has agreed what is being changed is absorbed without trace, which is why the strategy stage precedes the cohorts rather than following them.
How do engagements begin?
With a conversation of approximately thirty minutes, conducted by video call, on where the cost is concentrated in your commercial function, what changing it would involve and what it would be worth. There is no charge and no obligation to proceed, and if there is not enough in it to justify an engagement we will say so during that conversation rather than after two further meetings. Most people leave it with one or two things they can put a figure against immediately. There is also a free assessment on this site, which takes about two minutes and requires no email address in order to see the result.
VAIY