Junaid Haq

Career

Haq describes himself as a business transformation leader who has worked across manufacturing, logistics, procurement and operations. He describes his own background as technical, and says he approached technology with a software engineer mindset. He says he started his career in professional services for enterprises, focused on the data analytics layer, and that he moved from industry experience into building cloud technology and working with data and AI. [1]

Haq says he has mostly worked with enterprise clients, and some green field enterprises. He says he sold professional services to enterprise customers. He also says he has seen BRD cycles shrink from three or four months to weeks or days, and that he used to plan three-year or five-year strategies. [1]

Nestle and AWS

Haq says he worked at Nestle, where the business forecast 18 or 36 months ahead to plan its stock. He says that while he was at AWS, the per-unit cost of bringing services to clients fell every year. He says that in his AWS sales days, a frequent client question was how to make complex work easier. Haq says he is no longer at AWS and now works on the business side. [1]

Amazon

Haq says he works in Amazon's global procurement and sustainability organization. He says his organization ensures compliance with ESG rules, EU corporate social responsibility due diligence acts and human rights acts. He describes his remit as business transformation that uses technology, AI and data to execute sustainability strategies, and says his function has more than 100 thousand suppliers. [1]

Views on operating models and AI adoption

Haq says organizations are trying to solve problems without changing their operating model. He defines an operating model as who does what, and the governance systems. He says companies need to rethink their operating models to reach the future state. He cites a recent MIT study that found 95% of AI use cases are not yielding P&L level benefits. [1]

He says problems have almost always remained the same, and that what has changed is the approach and mindset in how problems are tackled and solved. He says a new tool or a new way of solving things appears every three or four months, and that companies in tech cannot plan too far ahead. He adds that the business side still wants to forecast two to three years ahead for stability. [1]

Haq calls the change people-centric and says benefits depend on bringing people on the journey. He says benefits will stay limited to a few pilots or individuals unless roles are rewritten. He says the capability and the people are the most crucial elements of the transformation journey. He says AI works best when cross-functional teams work together, and that teams need to challenge each other because everyone has their own biases and experiences. [1]

Views on skills and mindset

Haq says business end users need a product development mindset and that being data literate is one of the key enablers. He says the mindset needed is an AI native workflow mindset, alongside creative and design thinking. He says that bringing system thinking means thinking end to end through all the nodes of the ecosystem. [1]

Haq says the value of technical skills across any domain has fallen sharply since Claude's Opus models became mainstream. He estimates that 85 or 90% of the work people needed to get done is now done by AI models. He says the key skill is breaking each problem down in a data-driven way and mapping every node where data enters, and that beyond the LLMs, the work is breaking a problem into many parts and integrating AI into each one. He says it more often than not takes a very sharp understanding of the domain one is working in, and that AI outputs are poor without experience brought to them. [1]

Haq says the new world is a generalist world, where experience and core competence still matter. He says the world is probably moving toward generalists for whom solving problems is no longer hard, and that common sense and experience matter more than before. He says people who do not adapt and keep learning will be left behind, and that curiosity and the ability to keep learning matter at any age or level of experience. [1]

Views on roles and work

Haq says that today people are doing manual follow-ups, work on SLAs and reporting, as task executors. He says people freed from manual work will become orchestrators, that task executors will turn into trusted advisers, and that data owners will become contextual business guardians. He says trust is the new currency in this operating model. [1]

Views on cloud services and professional services

Haq says Amazon aims to build a flywheel in which scale lets it lower prices as its range of products and services grows. He says that each year, as costs came down, tools and services became more available. He says AWS was designed for the enterprise and was therefore inherently very technical, and that the complexity of AWS is far higher because its user experience was not designed for the new world. He says AWS may have the biggest advantage among the hyperscalers. [1]

Haq places Google somewhere in the middle on complexity, and says newer services ask for $20 a month. He describes the shift as largely an Android versus Apple situation and says the new world is the youtubification of software. He says a recent Amazon product gives enterprises the capability to deploy without too much technical hard work, and that Amazon has recently made products easier for SMB and startup customers to deploy quickly. [1]

Haq says companies can build, deploy and scale quickly without large consulting teams, and that a $5 million contract can now be achieved at $50,000. He says professional services firms are also pivoting, and that professional services contracts have moved from million-dollar deals to hundreds of thousands. He says commercial discussions were already moving toward outcome-based contracts in his time, and describes contingency deals in which the provider puts skin in the game against promised savings. [1]

Haq says SMBs need value quickly because of their size, profitability and financial health, and that ROI comes quickly for organizations even when professional services reduce deployment time. He says SMBs and enterprises will both benefit from an outcome-based future if they are nimble. He says SMB and startup growth is more exponential than growth in other sectors, and that companies building from scratch are likely to create the most agile and lean structures. [1]

Outlook

Haq says that in the next five years, ways of doing business will be rewritten. He says the ecosystem will flourish overall and that there is hope of positivity in the future. He says traceability of decision-making with LLMs could become a line of business for some firms, and gives the example of a consultant or advisory firm selling a service that creates a new line of business. [1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Junaid Haq: stop bolting AI onto broken operating models . Beyond the Bubble , 2026-07-31.