Mansour Al Blooshi

In this story

1. A career that began with a whistle
2. The institutions between airline and cybersecurity
3. What Etihad taught him
4. MBZUAI: buying for a young AI university
5. The infrastructure and the unfinished purchase order
6. What he expected of a research partner
7. Choosing technology through a stated test
8. Sustainability as a scoring rule
9. Building a function from scratch
10. CPX and the problem of security-first sourcing
11. One role, two mandates
12. Digital procurement and the UAE's direction
13. Changing minds about procurement
14. His advice

A career that began with a whistle

Mansour Al Blooshi did not plan a career in procurement. In an interview with Procurement Magazine, he said he had never heard the word "procurement" until a manager at Etihad Airways raised it in conversation. He was working as a member of the airline's cabin crew at the time. Before that, he had been a professional football referee in the UAE league.

Asked what refereeing gave him, he told the magazine it taught him three lessons that he carries into procurement: fairness, patience and clear decision-making.

He also described a plain way of learning. He told Procurement Magazine that he picked up the work through hard work, by following his mentor's direction and by "never making the same mistake twice".

According to The Arab Today, the rest of the sequence runs through several of the UAE's best-known institutions. It lists Etihad Airways, Khalifa University and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) before his current employer, and credits him with more than a decade of procurement experience.

The institutions between airline and cybersecurity

Procurement Magazine supplies a more precise sequence between Al Blooshi's airline work and his later university leadership. After a couple of years in Etihad's procurement team, he moved to Masdar Institute, which later merged with Khalifa University. He spent four years there before joining MBZUAI and subsequently becoming its Head of Procurement.

What Etihad taught him

In the Arab Today interview he gives each employer a lesson. At Etihad Airways, he said, he learned the value of precision and compliance.

MBZUAI: buying for a young AI university

He became Head of Procurement at MBZUAI, the Abu Dhabi university devoted to artificial intelligence. Procurement Magazine described it as the world's first graduate research university dedicated to AI. In the earlier magazine account, the university was a young institution with 283 students from 41 countries, had already graduated its first master's students, and was preparing for its first PhD graduates.

Procurement Magazine noted that the university was a start-up pioneering a high-level curriculum in computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing, and that it also had to get through the pandemic.

In the later Insights Success interview, Al Blooshi credits MBZUAI with shaping how he thinks about the job. He describes a decision that he says changed his view of his role. The choice was between two components for a new AI research cluster. One was cheaper, available immediately and came from an established vendor. The other was more expensive, came from a young start-up and offered better performance. Conventional procurement practice, the magazine says, would have picked the first. He chose the second.

The magazine presents this as the moment he stopped thinking about purchase orders and started thinking about outcomes.

The same feature describes another acquisition challenge from his university work. The university needed a state-of-the-art computing cluster for a major AI research initiative. Only a handful of suppliers worldwide could meet the specification, which gave those suppliers strong pricing leverage. Research groups competed for the limited resource. International rules and export controls added legal complexity, and the university's reputation depended on delivering. The feature reports that he navigated it. The lesson he draws is that strategic sourcing can work as a geopolitical tool, and that at its most consequential procurement serves national objectives as well as organisational ones.

The infrastructure and the unfinished purchase order

The magazine's full company report describes the university's technology supply relationships in Al Blooshi's own account. Emircom supported its initial IT infrastructure. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Alpha Data then worked on the high-performance-computing data centre. He identified IT as the university's main supplier category and expressed a preference for working with local companies where possible. Emircom and Alpha Data were named as Abu Dhabi-based partners.

The same report records a less glamorous difficulty when he arrived: procurement was being processed manually while the institution was between digital systems. Al Blooshi described creating bespoke systems and processes to keep track of open purchase orders and close them before they affected his annual budget.

His team was also becoming larger and more specialised. The report describes procurement work being supported across contracts, vendor management and quality assurance. Al Blooshi acknowledged the effort and resources that development required and expected it to improve efficiency. He also spoke about enjoying the work of helping colleagues understand procurement.

What he expected of a research partner

In the Insights Success account, Al Blooshi identifies three lessons from working with AI researchers. He describes procurement discipline as strategic agility: building frameworks that can source new technologies quickly while retaining compliance and risk management. He describes stakeholder management as partnership with researchers whose work he needs to understand, rather than a process of imposing instructions on them. His third lesson is accountability for consequences. When a purchase affects a research programme, he argues, the procurement team shares responsibility for the academic and reputational effects of its decisions. These are the expectations he says he carried from the university into his later supply-chain leadership.

Choosing technology through a stated test

The Insights Success feature identifies a separate method he calls Impact-Driven Innovation. He begins by defining the problem, then examines strategic alignment and what he describes as return on impact, and pilots an idea before scaling it.

Sustainability as a scoring rule

In the Procurement Magazine interview, Al Blooshi said sustainability was one of the main goals of the Abu Dhabi Government and not only of the university.

His first sustainability step was the removal of plastic water bottles. He then wrote a sustainability policy for procurement that told suppliers what they had to do to meet the university's requirements. The most concrete detail is how it was built into the evaluation: sustainability was worth between five and ten marks, which he put at around 20 percent of the commercial evaluation. From IT to kitchen supplies, he said, the team looked for products that are recyclable, sustainable and do not harm the environment.

In The Arab Today interview he returns to the same theme. He says he aligns procurement with the Abu Dhabi Government's sustainability goals and with the corporate social responsibility framework of his organisation, sources from eco-conscious suppliers, promotes local vendors, and judges purchases on environmental and ethical criteria. He adds that the work includes educating internal stakeholders on the long-term economic value of sustainability.

Building a function from scratch

The Arab Today profile also asked him about setting up a procurement department inside a government entity. His answer is a sequence rather than a story: define clear policies and procedures consistent with government regulations and international best practice, build a capable team, put digital systems in place, introduce a performance management framework with key performance indicators, and train end users so they understand the process and comply with it. He says that within months the function moved from an administrative role to a structured department that optimised costs and improved accountability.

CPX and the problem of security-first sourcing

The Arab Today and Insights Success identify Al Blooshi as Director of Supply Chain and Business Services at CPX. CPX describes itself on its website as a provider of cyber and physical security solutions and as a G42 company, based in Abu Dhabi.

In the Insights Success interview he describes a domain where a supply chain decision reaches well past a delayed shipment: a compromised hardware component or a vulnerable software library can expose critical infrastructure and sensitive data. His answer is a principle he calls "Security-First Sourcing". Every vendor, component and contract is assessed on price and delivery time and also on potential vulnerability and the effect on the client's security posture. He describes the change as a move from reactive problem-solving to proactive risk management.

He adds a specific warning about what he calls "N-th Tier Supply Chain Interdependency Risk". The idea is that the vulnerabilities leadership teams miss usually sit with sub-suppliers two or three layers away from the direct supplier. A disruption at a third-tier component maker, he says, can cripple an operation even when the first-tier supplier performs perfectly. His recommended countermeasures are practical: deep supply chain mapping, monitoring of threat intelligence, deliberate diversification and redundancy, and scenario planning.

One role, two mandates

His title joins two functions that are often kept separate: supply chain and business services. He explains the logic in the Insights Success interview. A conventional supply chain role covers the flow of goods and contracted services. His wider remit gives him sight across shared services, facilities management, IT procurement and vendor management, so he can spot dependencies and duplication that a narrower role would miss.

The risk he names is that the combined function drifts into being a "support department". His remedy is what he calls a "Business Enabler mindset": engaging with internal stakeholders, aligning goals with organisational strategy, and measuring success through operational uptime, employee productivity and speed to market as well as cost savings. "We transform from a cost center into a value driver," he says.

Asked to define procurement value, he gives two terms, "Innovation Access" and "Strategic Resilience". The first means using supplier and partner ecosystems to bring in technology, expertise and capabilities that cannot be built internally. In cybersecurity, he says, that includes threat intelligence platforms, advanced encryption tools and specialised talent. The second means supply chains that can absorb geopolitical, technological or logistical shocks without breaking.

He proposes three measures to go with them: time to market for critical technologies, supplier-enabled innovation, and supply chain risk reduction.

Digital procurement and the UAE's direction

In The Arab Today interview he is optimistic about technology. Digital procurement, he says, brings transparency, speed and strategic insight to the UAE's supply chains, through e-sourcing platforms, AI analytics and automated approval systems. These tools help organisations move from reactive purchasing to proactive planning.

At CPX, he says, he designed an end-to-end procurement strategy aligned with the organisation's business vision, introduced tools that automate workflows and give more visibility, simplified vendor management by issuing quick procurement guidelines for end users, and used strategic sourcing and negotiation to cut costs while improving quality and service.

His Insights Success interview takes the argument to national level. He believes the next era of procurement in the region will be defined by "Sovereign Resilience and Tech-Driven Strategic Autonomy". The idea is to move the focus from taking part efficiently in global supply chains to building and securing national supply chain capability. In practice that means developing local suppliers and strategic stockpiles, investing in AI and automation, putting cybersecurity into every node of the chain, and training procurement leaders who understand geopolitics as well as logistics.

Changing minds about procurement

Many senior leaders think of procurement as a blocker. Al Blooshi does not dispute their experience. He says they are wrong about what procurement could be. His method, which he calls "Proactive Transparency and Solution-Oriented Dialogue", has four parts. Anticipate problems before leaders raise them and bring solutions already mapped out. Translate procurement language into business outcomes, so that "we need more lead time" becomes "here is how we get your product to market six weeks faster". Give leaders data that shows procurement as an intelligence function. Keep communication short, because executives respond to impact statements and not process narratives.

For his own team, he describes an empowering style: clear strategic direction, the resources people need, and then room to execute, learn and fail fast. Turning a team from an operational factory into a strategic engine, he says, means redefining its mission and metrics, building business and analytical skills, granting real ownership, giving people exposure across functions, and celebrating strategic wins as loudly as cost savings. He keeps a short list of non-negotiables: ethical conduct, strategic alignment, proactive risk management, continuous improvement and accountability.

He is a CIPS-certified professional, according to The Arab Today. He says the affiliation reinforces his commitment to global standards, and that the practices it supports include benchmarking, professional development and lessons-learned reviews after each project. In the same interview, he describes listening to suppliers, engaging internal stakeholders and following changes in technology and markets as sources of improvement.

His advice

His advice to emerging procurement leaders is short. Think beyond transactions and focus on transformation. Understand both business strategy and emerging technology. Learn negotiation, stakeholder management and sustainability practice. Develop emotional intelligence and resilience, because procurement leadership is as much about people as about processes. The best leaders in the field, he says, are not just cost-savers but value creators and strategic enablers of growth.