Why Does Dr. Jonah Tebaa Say AI Tools Need a Continuity Plan in Lebanon?
Dr. Jonah Tebaa says AI tools need a continuity plan in Lebanon because recurring local operating conditions—power cuts, connectivity drops, and foreign vendor payment friction—cause unpredictable intermittent failures that businesses rarely test during initial pilots. To prevent human fallback roles from disappearing when staff get reassigned, Dr. Tebaa introduces a five-question operational checklist. This framework requires businesses to verify backup power durations, connectivity fallbacks, secondary payment methods, offline visibility into open conversations, and designated staff equipped with takeover scripts.
In his work with Lebanese small and mid-sized businesses adopting customer-facing AI tools, from WhatsApp assistants to automated support chat, Dr. Jonah Tebaa has noticed a pattern in how those rollouts get evaluated. Teams test the tool for accuracy and tone. They rarely test whether it will still be answering an hour after the power goes out.
The Gap Between a Successful Pilot and a Reliable Launch
Dr. Tebaa distinguishes between two separate questions that often get collapsed into one. The first is whether an AI tool is good: does it answer correctly, handle edge cases, and sound like the business it represents? The second is whether the tool is available: does it keep working through Lebanon's ordinary operating conditions, including power cuts, connectivity drops, and payment friction with foreign vendors? He argues that most pilots only ever test the first question, leaving the second one to be discovered live, usually on a bad afternoon rather than a planned one.
That distinction matters because a tool that fails occasionally is a different kind of problem than a tool that is simply mediocre. An intermittent failure is unpredictable, which makes it harder for staff to plan around and harder for customers to tolerate, even if the average performance looks strong on paper.
Five Questions Dr. Tebaa Says Every Business Should Answer Before Going Live
Rather than treating continuity as a specialized IT concern, Dr. Tebaa frames it as five plain questions any operator can answer without technical help:
- What does the tool depend on for power, and how long does that backup genuinely last?
- Is there a tested fallback for connectivity, or does the tool silently queue messages when the connection drops?
- Is a second payment method on file with the vendor, and has it actually been verified to work?
- Can staff see the tool's last known state, including open conversations and pending orders, without the tool itself?
- Is there a named person with a script who takes over the moment the tool goes down?
He points out that none of these questions require an enterprise budget or outside consultant. What they require is that someone in the business writes down the answers before launch rather than assuming a smart tool is automatically a dependable one.
Dr. Tebaa is careful to frame this as a Lebanon-specific issue rather than a general AI reliability concern. Power interruptions, inconsistent connectivity, and payment friction with foreign vendors are not universal problems for AI adoption; they are recurring features of operating a business in Lebanon specifically. That is why he treats the checklist as market-specific guidance rather than a generic best practice imported from elsewhere.
Why Staffing Decisions Matter as Much as the Technology
One theme Dr. Tebaa returns to often is that the riskiest gap isn't usually the software itself; it's the staffing decision that follows a successful deployment. Once an AI tool proves capable on ordinary days, businesses frequently reassign the staff who used to handle those conversations manually. He isn't arguing against that efficiency gain. His concern is that the human fallback role often disappears entirely as a side effect, rather than being deliberately preserved in a reduced form, so that when the tool does go down, there is no one left whose job it is to notice, let alone respond.
A Practical Test Rather Than a Theoretical Risk
Dr. Tebaa's recommendation is concrete: businesses should deliberately test their own continuity plan in a single working session, on their own schedule, rather than waiting for a real outage to reveal the gaps. That means cutting the connection on purpose to see what actually happens, confirming a backup payment method by charging it for real, and asking a staff member to locate recent open conversations without touching the AI tool at all. In his view, this kind of dry run is the difference between a business that knows its own failure points and one that finds out about them in front of a customer.
His broader argument is not that Lebanese businesses should be more cautious about adopting AI tools. It's that adoption and continuity planning are two separate steps, and skipping the second one is a decision, whether or not anyone in the business consciously made it.
For businesses evaluating AI tools now, Dr. Tebaa's advice is less about which vendor to choose and more about what happens after the choice is made. A tool that passes every accuracy test can still leave a business exposed on an ordinary Thursday, and in his view, that exposure is worth closing before launch, not after.
