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Mohamed Boulahfati

Mohamed Boulahfati is a founder and data analyst based in Antwerp. Since April 2022 he has run Discover Trends โž• Build AI Assistants in 5 Minutes, which he founded.

Between January 2015 and March 2022 he worked as an algorithm developer at Prediction Algorithm. Before that, from June 2009 to December 2014, he was the owner of Mbclicks.

He lists analytical skills, business analysis, algorithms, pattern recognition and data mining among his areas of expertise.

Insights & takeaways

Mohamed Boulahfati's public writing centers on a single working question: how do you tell a genuine structural shift from a passing news cycle. Across his posts he returns again and again to this distinction, framing it explicitly as a discipline rather than a hunch. As he puts it, anyone trying to make strategic decisions "heeft weinig aan een eindeloze stroom nieuwsberichten, losse signalen en tijdelijke hypes" . His answer is not to chase individual headlines but to track how developments across several domains at once, technology, economy, companies, consumer behavior, innovation and regulation, start to reinforce one another . He states this most directly when he notes that "het verschil zit daarom niet alleen in wat er vandaag gebeurt, maar vooral in wat zich over langere tijd ontwikkelt" . This is the closest thing to a personal methodology in his output: a single AI chip announcement is just news, but chip capacity expansion, corporate infrastructure investment, energy bottlenecks and shifting government policy happening simultaneously is a trend worth acting on .

That cross-domain lens shows up most consistently in how he talks about artificial intelligence, which is the recurring subject across his signals. He traces a clear arc in AI's role in commerce: from systems that recommended products or answered customer questions to ones that now aim to "een groot deel van het aankoopproces zelfstandig kunnen uitvoeren," reducing how much a consumer has to search, compare or visit different sites manually . He applies the same lens to communication tools, describing an AI-native inbox that does not just surface a message but "zoekt relevante context op, stelt mogelijke antwoorden voor, controleert je agenda en bereidt een reactie" before a person even responds . And he extends the pattern into physical retail, pointing to how a discount chain's low prices mask a much larger shift toward RFID-driven self-checkout and robotic sorting behind the scenes . Read together, these pieces reflect a consistent claim: AI's trajectory is not about isolated features but about systems absorbing entire workflows, whether that workflow is shopping, email, or warehouse logistics.

He applies the same structural-versus-hype test to hardware and physical technology. Coverage of a London-based humanoid robotics company raising $152 million and reaching a $1.35 billion valuation is framed less around the funding number itself and more around who is at the table, noting that industrial partners like Bosch and Schaeffler are investors as well as operational collaborators . He treats Samsung's smart glasses, developed with Google and styled by Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, similarly, observing that what stands out is "hoe weinig ze op een klassiek technologisch product lijken," a sign that the technology is being deliberately hidden inside ordinary consumer design rather than sold as a gadget . The same instinct appears in his note on fiber-based packaging replacing plastic, where multiple large consumer companies are jointly developing a fiber bottle technology through a shared collective rather than pursuing it individually , and in Germany's move to become a direct shareholder in defense startups rather than just a customer, which he reads as part of a broader push to pull private capital into strategic sectors .

A related thread runs through his coverage of manufacturing and construction, where the recurring question is not

Career

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