— THE TEAM
Category experts who’ve done this before.
NIOS wad founded by Haifa Barbari and McVal Osborne — a team with deep experience in AI products, scaling brand and marketing operations, and building businesses to exit.
Haifa Barbari
Founder & CEO
Contact: Haifa@GetNIOS.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/haifabarbari/
Haifa Barbari is a futurist and founder working at the frontier of AI, creativity, and human sustainability. As founder and CEO of NIOS, building a stealth-stage AI venture with a mission as ambitious as the moment demands: advancing AI and human progress in the machine era. She is often brought in to speak about the future with the machines, and to advise organizations at moments of inflection — when ambiguity needs to become direction, and when leaders need to regain momentum in rapidly changing environments.
With 20 years of experience across technology, behavior change, product, and innovation leadership, Haifa was among the first to launch an AI marketing platform in health, and grew her career to lead strategy, AI and innovation across global companies. She has a prior exit and the original creator of Marketing to the Machines, a proprietary framework that helps organizations understand how AI systems interpret brands, shape visibility, and influence customer decision-making in the Generative Internet Era.
Recognized as an Innovator of the Year and one of the Top 50 Women in Tech, she has been featured in BBC News, ADWEEK, and Newsweek, and is a trusted voice at global summits on AI, marketing, creativity, and the future of work.
At the core of her work is a belief that creativity unlocks what's next — with AI and beyond it. Her mission is to inspire an equally advanced future: one that is both technologically powerful and deeply human, where humanity feels more, not less. She partners with businesses in the new era to shape products, services, and cultures that are Human Powered. AI Accelerated.
McVal Osborne is a data and AI leader who helps senior teams turn artificial intelligence from something they are buying into something they are actually using. As Co-Founder and CTO of 8ight Ventures, he leads the technology behind NIOS, working with senior stakeholders to identify where AI can unlock the most commercial value, shape the roadmap, and design and build the systems that bring it to life in practice. He combines top-level data leadership with hands-on delivery across modern AI tools, agent workflows, and production systems.
McVal brings 15+ years of experience at the intersection of data, marketing, and AI. He previously served as Chief Data Officer at Flight Story, Steven Bartlett's company, and as Head of Data and Insights at Social Chain Agency, where he gave the organization clear direction on the development of its data and analytics capabilities. Earlier in his career, he was UK Head of Strategy at ORC International (part of Engine Group), building strategic research functions that powered work for major brands across the UK, US, and Germany. Alongside 8ight Ventures, he is also Co-Founder of Crest Labs, where he is building human-centric AI tools including GroLink, an AI co-pilot for LinkedIn lead generation, and Gro3, an automatic organic web3 growth platform.
McVal brings a builder's instinct and a strategist's eye to every project, with a track record of translating complex data into clear commercial direction and turning ideas into systems that ship.
McVal Osborne
Co-Founder & CTO
Contact: McVal@GetNIOS.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mcval/
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