Muhammad Yasir Aleem, Founder and CEO of Brickclay, joined Zubia Irfan, Customer Success Manager at CxO Global Forum, for a 24-minute episode of The CxO Talk, streamed live on CxO Global TV on July 8, 2026. Drawing on more than 20 years in data engineering, analytics and cloud, he talked about why data quality decides whether AI pays off, where small businesses should start and what Brickclay is building next. Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
Aleem’s clearest example came from 2020. When the pandemic closed markets almost overnight, companies that had already invested in information and business intelligence systems had the data they needed in front of them. He says they made executive decisions within two to three weeks. Companies without those systems could not even tell whether their cash flow was still positive.
His advice for small businesses is to begin with the basic numbers every company should track: cash position, accounts receivable, daily sales outstanding and, on the HR side, employee turnover and overtime. Decisions built on those numbers, he argued, are stronger than decisions built on news and guesswork.
Asked about the biggest challenge in managing data, Aleem put data quality first: whether records are complete, consistent, accurate and free of duplicates, followed by infrastructure and security. Every AI application depends on an organization’s own data, so weak data means weak results.
He shared a client example. Brickclay built a machine learning churn model that predicted which customers would leave six months before they did. Customer care teams called those accounts early instead of reacting after the fact, and he credits the program with protecting $28 million a month in recurring revenue. It worked within six months, he said, because the client had kept clean data for the previous ten years.
Most finance teams still forecast and budget in Excel, padding numbers with buffers of 15 or 35 percent. Aleem described replacing that with AI forecasts of recurring and non-recurring revenue six months ahead, compared against actuals. The same approach predicts employee turnover by department, so leaders can see which team is losing people and why. That kind of forward view is where data analytics services now earn their keep.
Aleem called data maturity a block-building exercise. Connect the finance and HR systems you already have, agree on a short list of company-level KPIs, and add more as the business grows. One Brickclay client in US facility management started with about 120 people and today has 1,200 staff keeping 12,000 active sites running, with reporting that grew alongside it.
On digital transformation, his first rule is to find the business problem before picking any tool.
“Forget about technology, forget about AI, forget about everything,” he said. “Talk about which particular business segment is bleeding, where we need to pay attention.”
From there, he recommends milestone-driven programs with quarterly reviews that show what each investment returned, in saved hours, lower turnover or higher customer satisfaction. That discipline is what business intelligence reporting is meant to support.
Aleem named honesty as his first priority, followed by care for clients and the team and a habit of continuous learning. He measures his team on three things: financial growth, learning and personal growth.
On the future of AI, he was direct: “AI is not going to replace the people but empower the people to do their job in a better way. That’s my statement.”
He closed with two plans. On the design side, Brickclay is launching its own marketplace in 2026 to sell digital assets from a portfolio he put at more than a million unique designs. On the data side, the team is building a platform for small and mid-sized businesses that combines operational data with economic and geographic data sets and delivers pre-built data stories and dashboards for executives.
