The glass at the top of the Burj Khalifa does a curious thing at dusk. It turns the city into an idea. The highways soften into lines, the towers into propositions, and the water—whether one insists on calling it the Arabian Sea or the Arabian Gulf—becomes a patient constant, indifferent to ambition. From this height, Dubai looks less like a place than a thesis: that speed, scale, and intent can coexist, if only the operating model is sound.
It was here that Mark Rothwell-Brooks and Trevor Coyne met—not to announce anything (that would come later), but to agree on something far less ceremonial: that the era of transformation as theatre had ended, and the era of delivery as discipline had arrived.
For years, Mark had watched organisations across EMEA rehearse the same play. Act One: a declaration of intent—cloud-first, data-led, AI-enabled. Act Two: pilots that dazzled in committee rooms and demos that impressed precisely the people who already believed. Act Three: a long pause, during which risk committees asked questions no one had prepared for and operating teams wondered who would actually run the thing. The applause came early; the exits were crowded.
Trevor, meanwhile, had been sitting closer to the engine room. At OpsTalent, he saw what happened after the slides were approved—what it took to staff, run, secure, and sustain digital operations across borders and languages, under regulators who preferred evidence to enthusiasm. “Most initiatives don’t fail because the idea is wrong,” he said, looking down at the city. “They fail because the organisation assumes execution will take care of itself.”
From above, the distance between those perspectives vanished.
The trouble with ambition
EMEA is having a moment. Regulators are more sophisticated, not less. AI has moved from novelty to inevitability. Governments are digitising services while insisting—correctly—on sovereignty, resilience, and control. Banks are under pressure to do more with less, faster, and without incident. The ambition is real. So are the constraints.
What has changed is patience. Boards now ask a simpler question than they once did: What is live? Regulators ask a sterner one: Who is accountable? CFOs ask the most dangerous question of all: What did we get for it?
Mark had heard these questions enough times to know what they were really asking. Not for more strategy, but for proof that strategy could survive contact with reality. “The market doesn’t need another transformation narrative,” he said. “It needs an operating model that can carry the weight.”
Why partnerships fail—and why this one didn’t
The city below offered its own lesson. Dubai doesn’t work because it has the tallest buildings. It works because power, water, transport, and regulation are designed together. You can’t outsource gravity.
Too many transformation efforts, Mark and Trevor agreed, are assembled from parts that never meet: advisors who design, integrators who build, outsourcers who run—each optimised for their own contract, none accountable for the outcome. The handoffs are where momentum goes to die.
This was the problem VerityX—newly named, deliberately so—was created to address. To separate from theimpact.team was not an act of abandonment but of clarity. Focus matters. Execution requires it.
VerityX would be built to do the unglamorous work early: designing delivery into the strategy, governance into the workflow, and operations into the architecture. OpsTalent would bring what most strategies lack: a delivery engine that wakes up every morning and runs the thing—multilingual, regulated, and at scale.
“Partnership only works when incentives align,” Trevor said. “If one party wins at the point of sale and another inherits the risk, the system breaks.” From the height of the Burj Khalifa, that seemed obvious. On the ground, it rarely was.
AI, without the magic
If digital transformation had been guilty of overpromising, AI was in danger of repeating the offence—only faster. Everyone had a pilot. Few had production systems with monitoring, controls, and humans in the loop. The models were clever; the operations were brittle.
“AI doesn’t fail because it isn’t intelligent enough,” Mark said. “It fails because organisations underestimate what it takes to run intelligence safely.”
Here, the partnership showed its sharpest edge. VerityX would focus on AI execution: embedding models into real workflows, defining accountability, designing controls regulators could understand. OpsTalent would provide the operational backbone—support, monitoring, multilingual operations—without which AI remained a demo.
It was not anti-innovation. It was anti-illusion.
The view from above, the work below
As the light faded, the city resumed its scale. From this height, it was easy to believe that everything moved smoothly. Up close, it was all friction and effort. The point, Mark and Trevor agreed, was not to eliminate friction—that was impossible—but to design systems strong enough to move through it.
That, ultimately, was why the timing mattered. The market had matured. The questions had sharpened. The tolerance for theatre had evaporated. What remained was execution.
Below them, Dubai continued to do what it does best: make the improbable operational. Above the pilot phase, above the slides, above the noise, a partnership had formed around a simple idea—that delivery is a design choice, and now was the moment to choose it.
VerityX, partnered with OpsTalent, would step into that space—not promising transformation, but accepting responsibility for it.
And from the top of the tallest building in the world, that felt less like ambition than inevitability.
