Ather Jan is Director of Operations Systems & Governance at PanWorld Education, a UAE-based educational publishing and distribution group that supplies hundreds of schools across the UAE and Saudi Arabia and serves as regional distributor for leading international publishers.

He leads the group's operating model end to end – the way sales, procurement, warehouse, finance and delivery teams work together to move an order from a school's first request to books in the classroom. Operating across multiple legal entities and two national markets, he has set the direction for a phased transformation of PanWorld's operations: redefining how teams hand off work, establishing a single trusted view of customers and orders, and shifting the organisation from reporting what was invoiced to measuring what was actually delivered. His leadership is centred on making complex operations visible, accountable and predictable – giving every team clarity on its role and giving executives a reliable basis for decisions.

As the group's governance lead, he owns the framework that keeps growth under control: approval and authority structures, intercompany trading arrangements, data ownership and quality standards, information security policy, and the bilingual Arabic–English commercial agreements that govern relationships with schools, distributors and publishing partners under Saudi and UAE law.

He also sets the group's systems strategy, ensuring that ERP, collaboration platforms and AI-driven automation are adopted in service of operational outcomes rather than technology for its own sake.

As a speaker, Ather brings a practitioner-leader's perspective: how to transform operations in a mid-sized, multi-country business, lead change across functions, and build governance that enables rather than slows the organisation.