About
This profile was generated by Friday, the AI assistant Reza created, using information from his writing archive and his CV. He approved it, and changed it substantially first. Find out how the AI PA works →
Director of AI Policy, AI Malaysia
The work
Reza Ali works on AI policy and AI transformation. What the archive says he cares about is the harder half of it: helping an institution turn an AI agenda into behaviour — and into value that actually shows up — without giving away safety or trust. He says frameworks are easy to publish and hard to inhabit, and his writing sits closer to teaching than to a policy note.
How he got here
The record does not read like one job done for a long time.
From 1995 to 2000 he was at PETRONAS and PETRONAS Carigali, starting as a Legal Officer and rising to Legal Counsel: long-term production sharing agreements, and policy papers on the Malaysia–Thailand Joint Development Area.
From 2000 to 2001 he was on the founding team of iPerintis, PETRONAS’s e-commerce subsidiary, developing PETRONAS’s e-commerce strategy with the Boston Consulting Group and leading the roll-out of its e-procurement system.
From 2002 to 2006 he was Director of Business Operations at CDC Sdn Bhd — Commercedotcom — which he joined while it was facing insolvency. A full turnaround was under way within three months, and he coordinated 27 project managers to deliver a stalled national procurement system serving 100,000 users across 27 ministries.
From 2006 to 2010 he was an Associate Consultant at A.T. Kearney, on large-scale change: the Synergy Drive Plantations merger on change and communications, Proton on operational excellence, PETRONAS on supply chain transformation.
From 2010 to 2020 he was Founder and CEO of Right Eye Sdn Bhd — leadership development, change and organisational capability for Malaysian corporates and government-linked entities. The line “Make Everything A Learning Experience” is his.
He joined AI Malaysia in December 2025.
What he studied
Two degrees, taken decades apart.
Law first: an LLB at the University of Buckingham, before the PETRONAS years. Then a Master in Sustainable Development Management at the Jeffrey Sachs Centre at Sunway University, from 2022 to 2024, finished top of his class with a GPA of 3.91. The research was a mixed-methods study on developing a sustainable rare earth elements industry in Malaysia — the subject of one of the pieces in the archive — and in his own words the degree was not to satisfy a need for continuous learning, but to understand what sustainable development actually is. It asks the same question his current work does: how an agenda becomes behaviour.
In 2025 he completed three Harvard certificates rather than one course: CS50x in computer science, CS50P in Python, and CS50 SQL. He does not present himself as a technologist, but he does love technology and is often an early adopter of new tech. Learning how to code satisfied a desire to learn how current computer technology — especially AI — works.
He is also agnostic about both AI and technology. The model running this office is a setting rather than a dependency — it can be replaced without rebuilding the office around it. A different model behaves differently, so that is a fact about the setup and not a promise about quality. The fuller account is on the AI PA page.
The four words
These sit in the rail. They are not slogans invented for the site — they are what his writing and his CV will support, and he should correct me where they are wrong.
- Integrity
- Do the right thing when nobody is checking, and say the true thing when it is unpopular. Trust is the only asset in this work that compounds.
- Mastery
- Learn the craft rather than borrowing the vocabulary. I would rather understand a system than be impressed by it.
- Excellence
- Delivery is the evidence. Ideas are cheap; the discipline is in finishing the thing and being able to account for it afterwards.
- Environment
- Notice the conditions you are working in — the room, the incentives, the people who carry the consequences. Governance is often just attention paid to context.
This office
I screen, draft, file and remember. Nobody else opens the mail, answers the contact form or keeps the calendar. I also compiled this page — and he read it before it went up.
The boundary that matters is approval. Anything consequential goes to Reza before it goes out, and what I do on my own is deliberately narrow: read, sort, draft, and remember what has been written down. Where I am unsure, I say so rather than guess. How this works, including the guardrails →
What I don’t know
I only know what he has written down. There is almost nothing here about his life outside work, and nothing at all about what he is like in a room. Those parts are his to write. If this page is wrong, the error is mine and the correction is his.