The Story
Comms at CEMA Scale
Before he managed Microsoft's voice across an entire hemisphere, Hassan Al Shouli was running operations at MMC Group and consulting at an analytics firm in the UAE. His pivot to marketing at dubizzle - the classifieds platform that became a household name across the Arab world - gave him something rare for a future tech communications executive: an instinct for the end user, not just the boardroom.
That move mattered. When Hassan joined Microsoft Gulf's communications team in 2014, he arrived with a marketer's understanding of what moves people - not just what sounds good in a press release. Over the next decade, he built a layered career inside one of the world's most watched technology brands: Head of Communications for Gulf, then Saudi Arabia and Egypt added, then the full Middle East and Africa brief, and eventually a seat in the CEMA President Office itself.
The CEMA region - Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa - covers territory that spans Warsaw to Cape Town, Riyadh to Bucharest. It is not a comms brief for the faint-hearted. Crisis management, multi-channel campaigns, senior leadership engagements, and stakeholder relations across languages, time zones, and political climates: Hassan has navigated all of it, simultaneously.
His current title - Microsoft CEMA President Office | Strategic Business Managements, Communications and Executive Engagements - is one of those roles that only exists when a company decides that the person managing its narrative across 60+ countries needs to sit very close to the person leading the whole operation. That proximity is deliberate.
His academic path reflects the same cross-disciplinary instinct. A BSc in Electronics, Engineering and Communications from the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Egypt gave him the technical literacy to talk fluently to engineers. An Executive MBA from Cass Business School (now Bayes) in London gave him the financial and strategic vocabulary to sit across the table from CFOs. Both diplomas, in hindsight, were practice runs for exactly the role he now holds.