Omar Yamak, CEO & Co-Founder, Infoquest, as told to The Iq Edit
There is a version of the AI conversation in expert networks that goes like this: AI will find the experts, match them to briefs, and make the whole thing faster and cheaper. People will become optional extras. The industry will automate itself.
That version is half right. The automation part is coming. But the conclusion people draw from it, that the human role shrinks, is wrong. If anything, the opposite is true. As AI handles more of the search, the things only humans can do become the only real differentiator left.
At Infoquest, we have been sitting with this question for a while now. According to our talk with our founder, Omar Yamak, here is what we actually think is happening.
The search is going to AI. That part is settled.
When we started building Infoquest, using AI meant using ChatGPT. That felt early and different. It was not. Within a year, every client, every competitor, and every intern was doing the same thing. Using a general AI tool stopped being an edge and became a baseline.
What is coming next is different in kind, not just degree. We are building expert matching algorithms that take a client brief and return a shortlist of profiles in minutes, doing in minutes what a research associate used to spend hours on. The research phase: reading reports, scanning LinkedIn, identifying who has the right background in the right market at the right time. AI is going to own that process, and it is going to own it completely.
The honest version of where this ends up is that AI will handle roughly 95% of the search volume in this industry. If you think that number is too high, you are probably not thinking far enough ahead.
“If you don’t think AI is going to take over 95% of the search, you are delusional. It is already happening. The question is what you build around it.”
This is not a threat to the expert network model. It is a compression of the part of the model that was always a cost centre. The valuable part, the reason clients come back, was never really the list of names. It was always everything that happened around it.
The human side is not shrinking. It is concentrating.
Here is what AI cannot do. It cannot read the energy in a conversation when an expert is hesitant and figure out exactly what to say to get them comfortable. It cannot understand why a specific person in a specific market might be cautious about talking to a foreign client, and it cannot navigate that nuance in real time. It cannot build the kind of relationship with an expert that makes them pick up the phone six months later because they have something relevant to share.
These are not soft skills in the sense of optional extras. In a networking business, they are the product. You are not selling a database. You are selling access to people who trust you enough to give their real insight, and clients who trust you enough to act on it. That trust is entirely human.
What this means practically is that the role of the people in this industry is going to change shape. Less time on the research phase. Much more time on the things that research cannot touch: engaging experts, understanding client pain points before they are fully articulated, building relationships that survive beyond a single brief.
“You need to direct the AI. If you let it go on its own, it will start going into places you don’t want. The human in the loop is always more powerful.”
The concept of human in the loop, keeping a person in the decision chain when AI is working, is something we think about a lot. It is not just a safety mechanism. It is where the quality comes from. AI surfaces options; humans make the call.
Be Able to Do
AI cannot replicate
What this means for who we hire
The shift has changed what we look for in the people who join Infoquest. The research-heavy associate role, the one defined by finding names and checking databases, is being absorbed by the tools. What remains, and what we are investing in heavily, is emotional intelligence.
Someone who can cold call an expert they have never spoken to, figure out in thirty seconds whether this is the right person, and whether they are open to the conversation, and then make them feel genuinely good about participating. Someone who can sit with a client who is not quite sure what they need and help them get to the actual question. Someone comfortable operating in ambiguity, reading people, and making judgment calls that no algorithm is going to make for them.
Omar mentioned that, coming from an engineering background, this took a while to fully internalise. Technical skills matter. But in an industry that is about to automate most of its technical work, the skills that cannot be automated are not a nice-to-have. They are the whole job.
The firms that do not get this are in trouble
There are companies in this industry that are responding to AI by cutting people and letting the tools run. That might look efficient in the short term. What it actually does is remove the only thing that made the service worth paying for.
The firms that come out of this transition well will be the ones that use AI to free up their people, not replace them. Faster search means more time for the conversations that matter. Better matching means the human interaction starts from a higher baseline. The technology does the volume work; the people do the relationship work.
That is the model we are building at Infoquest. It is not complicated. But it requires actually believing that the human side of this business is worth protecting, not just as a talking point, but in how you hire, how you train, and what you measure.
AI is coming for the search. Good. Let it. The rest is still ours.
About Omar Yamak
Omar Yamak is the CEO and Co-Founder of Infoquest. Before building Infoquest, he helped grow the North American office of Dialectica from 10 to nearly 200 people. He is based in the Middle East and is focused on taking Infoquest global.
This piece was produced from a conversation with Omar Yamak and edited by the Infoquest team
