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Ziad Sakr

Work

Building AI systems that have to hold up

Healthcare intelligence by day, sports intelligence as a founder. Different domains, the same engineering discipline: dense information, high stakes, and a hard requirement that the output can be trusted.

Current

June 2026 — Present

InpharmD

Founding AI Engineer

Y Combinator-backed healthcare technology company

I build production AI systems for healthcare and pharmacy intelligence — systems that have to hold up against dense clinical literature, drug data, and guidelines where being approximately right is not good enough.

Clinical and pharmaceutical information is a genuinely hard substrate for AI. It is dense, fragmented across sources, frequently contested, constantly updated, and read by people making decisions that matter. A system that is fluent but unreliable is worse than useless in that setting — so most of the engineering goes into grounding, verification and measurement rather than generation.

My work spans the full lifecycle: architecture and experimentation, then evaluation, then production deployment and everything that keeps a system correct once real users depend on it. Prototyping against a language model is the easy part of that arc, and the least interesting.

Areas of work

  • AI-assisted drug information

    Answering clinical drug questions against real evidence.

  • Clinical & pharmaceutical intelligence

    Turning fragmented source material into structured, checkable knowledge.

  • AI agents

    Multi-step systems that plan, retrieve, and verify before they answer.

  • Retrieval & evidence systems

    Grounding every claim in a traceable source.

  • Therapeutic interchange intelligence

    Reasoning across interchangeable therapies and their constraints.

  • Formulary & drug-class analysis

    Comparative analysis across classes and formularies.

  • Guideline intelligence

    Making clinical guidance machine-readable and current.

  • Healthcare research automation

    Compressing literature workflows that used to take hours.

  • Production LLM systems

    Latency, cost, reliability, and failure behaviour under real load.

  • Evaluation & validation

    Measuring correctness continuously, not once at demo time.

  • AI infrastructure & architecture

    The pipelines, services, and data systems underneath all of it.

Written deliberately at the level of what the work is, not how it is implemented. Nothing here describes InpharmD's proprietary architecture, customers, datasets, prompts, infrastructure or commercial information.

Current · Founder

November 2024 — Present

Core Sports AI

Co-Founder & CEO

An AI performance intelligence platform for squash.

Core Sports AI turns match footage into performance intelligence. Computer vision reads the match — players, ball, shots, positions — and the analytics layer turns that into the kind of read a good coach gives you, at a scale no one can watch by hand.

I lead technology and product end-to-end: the AI architecture, the computer vision stack, the analytics systems, the product itself, and the technical direction of the company.

STRAIGHT DRIVERECOVERY TO TUNDER PRESSURE

Previous

Dates to confirm

SOLS

Co-Founder

An AI-focused operations and maintenance platform for Engineering, Procurement, and Construction organisations.

SOLS explored whether AI could predict infrastructure defect events before they surfaced, give operations and maintenance workers concrete resolution guidance, and let teams interrogate predicted maintenance information directly instead of reading reports about it.

SOLS was an early lesson in what applied AI actually demands outside a research setting: messy operational data, users who need an answer they can act on rather than a probability, and a domain where the cost of a wrong prediction is measured in site visits and downtime. It shaped how I think about deploying AI into real workflows.

  • Predictive maintenance
  • Operational decision support
  • Applied AI in the field

Contact

Building something at the intersection of AI and the real world?

I'm glad to hear from engineers, founders, researchers, coaches and athletes — and from anyone working on AI systems that have to be right rather than merely impressive.