AI Progress 2025

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2025 is shaping up to be a year of rapid advancement and global collaboration. Breakthroughs in generative AI, emerging agentic AI systems, and aspirations toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) are driving major shifts in business and society. Notably, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – led by ambitious initiatives in the UAE and Saudi Arabia – has stepped onto the world stage as a key AI powerhouse. This article provides a comprehensive overview of 2025’s AI progress, weaving in the significant contributions of MENA’s leading entities (G42, SDAIA, MBZUAI, SCAI, Aramco Digital, HUMAIN, M42, Mubadala, the Dubai Government, to name a few) alongside developments in the US, China, and beyond. We’ll also compare Arabic and English AI developments, and highlight how these innovations are transforming marketing and customer experience (CX).

Global AI Trends in 2025: Generative to Agentic AI

The past year has seen generative AI move from novelty to mainstream. Large Language Models (LLMs) and image generators are now widely deployed in content creation, customer service, and marketing. Over 56% of marketers report their companies are actively implementing AI, with only 44% still waiting for more mature solution. In fact, 73% of marketing teams say AI is already helping them deliver personalized customer experiences. Companies use AI to optimize content (51%), generate creative assets (50%), and brainstorm ideas (45%), automating many routine tasks. Analysts project that by 2025 AI could be handling up to 95% of customer interactions in some capacity (via chatbots or voice assistants) – a figure that underscores the crucial role of AI in customer experience (CX). Notably, consumers remain discerning: 90% of people still prefer a human customer service representative over a bot for complex issues, highlighting that AI augmentation must be done thoughtfully to truly enhance CX.

Agentic AI – AI systems capable of autonomous decision-making and actions – is heralded as the next frontier. Gartner named “Agentic AI” a top strategic technology trend for 2025 and predicts that by 2028 about 33% of enterprise software applications will include AI agents (up from less than 1% in 2024), enabling roughly 15% of work decisions to be made autonomously. In a business context, this means AI “co-workers” could handle routine decisions, optimize workflows, and even coordinate tasks across departments. Surveys show 90% of businesses already see this kind of agentic AI as a potential source of competitive advantage for its efficiency and decision-making boost. The global market for AI agents, valued around $5.1 billion in 2024, is projected to soar nearly tenfold to $47 billion by 2030 – indicating huge investment in tools like autonomous chatbots, process automation bots, and adaptive decision agents.

This shift toward autonomy is driving the creation of AI agency frameworks to govern and guide AI behavior. Industry and regulators alike are working on guardrails to ensure responsible AI agents. The World Economic Forum’s new AI Governance Alliance unites tech companies, governments, and academia to develop best practices so that as AI systems gain more “agency,” they remain transparent, ethical, and aligned with human values. In practical terms, frameworks differentiate between human-in-the-loop agents (where humans supervise or provide final approvals) and human-out-of-the-loop agents (which operate independently). In 2025 we see enterprises balancing these modes: leveraging AI autonomy for speed and efficiency, while instituting oversight for safety-critical or brand-sensitive tasks. For example, AI might autonomously personalize marketing to millions of customers in real-time, but humans still review the AI’s strategies and intervene in atypical cases – a collaborative “centaur” model of working.

Meanwhile, the quest for AGI – AI with human-level cognitive abilities across domains – continues to spark debate. Some experts, including leaders at major AI labs, suggest that AGI could be reached in the next decade or two, with one poll of researchers indicating a 50% likelihood by around 2040-2060. Others urge caution, noting that current systems (even GPT-4 level models) still fall short of true general intelligence and reliability. In 2025, AGI remains mostly aspirational, but the year has seen concrete steps to prepare for it. Notably, governments have ramped up AGI-focused policy: the U.S. government issued executive guidance on AI safety and called for “red-teaming” of advanced models to uncover risks, while the EU’s forthcoming AI Act includes provisions that would regulate foundation models and any future AGI. A landmark UK AI Safety Summit in late 2024 resulted in a first-ever multinational agreement acknowledging the long-term risk of frontier AI systems and committing to collaboration on safe development. Major AI companies (OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic among others) have formed teams for “AI alignment” research, exploring how to imbue advanced AIs with goals that remain beneficial to humans. Even as ChatGPT-style generative AI tools become ubiquitous in marketing and productivity, there is increasing emphasis on evaluation frameworks to ensure these models don’t produce harmful content or biased outputs – crucial for maintaining customer trust in AI-driven interactions.

China and the U.S. continue to lead in overall AI investments and research, but their approaches in 2025 reflect different priorities. In the United States, the private sector – especially Big Tech firms – drives generative AI innovation, exemplified by models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 (whose multi-modal capabilities expanded in late 2024) and Google’s Gemini. Enterprises across America are integrating these models into products: from AI-powered marketing content platforms to virtual assistants that handle banking customer queries. U.S. marketing and media industries are leveraging generative AI at scale, and new startups abound in fields like AI-driven customer analytics and ad personalization. The U.S. government has taken a lighter regulatory touch so far, focusing on voluntary AI safety commitments from companies and funding AI research (e.g., the NSF’s National AI Research Institutes). By contrast, China’s AI ecosystem in 2025 is marked by state-guided growth and a focus on domestic language/culture. Tech giants like Baidu, Inc., Alibaba Group, Huawei, and Tencent have each debuted their own Chinese-language LLMs (such as Baidu’s ERNIE 4.0, touted as a GPT-4 competitor). The Chinese government implemented regulations requiring licenses for generative AI services and mandating content controls, which has slowed public rollout of some chatbots but not dampened investment. Importantly, China’s models are being optimized for Mandarin and dialects, and embedded in super-apps for e-commerce and social media – for instance, AI systems that can compose personalized product descriptions or answer customer questions on platforms like Alibaba’s Taobao. This bifurcation (English vs. Chinese AI ecosystems) underscores the significance of locale-specific AI. It’s here that Arabic AI development has begun to make its mark, ensuring that the 400+ million Arabic speakers are not left behind in the AI revolution.

MENA’s Emergence as an AI Powerhouse in 2025

In 2025, the MENA region – especially the Gulf states – has aggressively positioned itself as the third global pillar of AI, alongside the US and China. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have launched national strategies and poured unprecedented investments into AI R&D, infrastructure, and education. A hallmark of these efforts is the close partnership between government authorities, sovereign wealth funds, and newly formed AI-focused organizations to drive initiatives at a scale previously unseen in the region. Below I highlight the major AI initiatives, investments, and leadership contributions of key MENA entities, and how they are shaping AI’s trajectory in areas like policy, research, infrastructure, and customer-centric applications.

United Arab Emirates: G42, MBZUAI, M42, Mubadala (MGX), and Dubai’s AI Ambitions

G42 – The Abu Dhabi-based AI Conglomerate: UAE’s G42 has rapidly become a global name in AI, spearheading projects from large-scale cloud infrastructure to advanced analytics and biotechnology. In 2025, G42 made headlines through a landmark $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft to accelerate AI innovation. This partnership not only brings Microsoft’s Azure cloud and AI capabilities into G42’s fold, but also places Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith on G42’s board – a strong signal of global confidence in G42’s vision. As part of the deal, G42 and Microsoft have committed to a “secure and responsible AI” framework under government oversight, ensuring compliance with international norms while they build out AI solutions across finance, healthcare, energy and government sectors.

One of G42’s flagship achievements is Jais, a powerful 13-billion-parameter bilingual (Arabic-English) LLM developed by G42’s research arm (Inception) in collaboration with Cerebras Systems and the MBZUAI (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence) (MBZUAI). Jais is hailed as the world’s most advanced Arabic LLM, trained on 116 billion Arabic tokens and designed to understand Arabic’s unique morphology and context. In a breakthrough for Arabic NLP, Jais was open-sourced and made available via Microsoft’s Azure AI catalog, instantly putting a state-of-the-art Arabic generative model in the hands of over 400 million Arabic speakers and developers. This development addresses a long-standing gap: AI services (from chatbots to content generators) can now function fluently in Arabic, which greatly enhances marketing and CX applications in MENA. For example, an Arabic customer service bot can comprehend and respond in dialectal Arabic with high accuracy, and marketing teams can use Jais to generate Arabic copy that resonates culturally – tasks that earlier English-centric models struggled with.

G42 is also expanding its global reach through strategic partnerships. In a high-profile UAE-France collaboration, G42 partnered with France’s Mistral AI to co-develop next-generation AI platforms and infrastructure. Announced at the Elysée’s “Choose France” summit in early 2025, this partnership exemplifies a new model of cross-border AI cooperation. It combines G42’s operational scale (including its cloud unit “Core42” and research unit “Inception”) with Mistral’s expertise in open large-language models, aiming to deliver open, interoperable AI solutions for industries across Europe, the Middle East, and the Global South. The G42-Mistral alliance will jointly work on everything from training advanced models and AI agents to building specialized AI cloud infrastructure, emphasizing a balance of “sovereignty with interoperability“. In practical terms, this could yield AI systems that respect local data sovereignty (a priority for many nations) while remaining compatible with global AI standards – a crucial consideration for multinational enterprises. G42’s Group CEO Peng Xiao described the partnership as “laying the groundwork for a digitally interdependent future where trust and transparency are non-negotiable,” reflecting the UAE’s ethos of responsible AI leadership. It’s also noteworthy that Mistral AI will explore collaborations with MBZUAI as part of this deal, illustrating how UAE’s academic and commercial ecosystems synergize to attract top-tier AI research talent.

On the infrastructure front, G42 – via its subsidiary G42 Cloud – has been building large-scale computing power. Reports indicate G42 plans to deploy up to 2 GW of AI-optimized data centers in India over the next years, housing supercomputers potentially reaching 8 exaFLOPS of performance. If achieved, that would be one of the world’s most powerful AI supercomputing resources, further cementing UAE’s role in the global AI compute race. Domestically, G42 already operates the “Artemis” supercomputer (a collaboration with Cerebras) and is a key player in the UAE’s MGX fund, which invests in AI infrastructure.

MBZUAI – Nurturing AI Talent and Research: The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi – the world’s first graduate-level AI university – has become a cornerstone of the UAE’s AI strategy. By 2025, MBZUAI is producing cutting-edge research and highly skilled graduates from across the globe, thanks to its recruitment of renowned faculty and partnerships with industry. MBZUAI played a pivotal role in developing the Jais model, leading its training and evaluation, and continues to focus on AI that addresses Arabic language understanding (“advancing cultural diversity through AI” as one MBZUAI report puts it). This year, MBZUAI joined forces with G42’s analytics firm Presight to launch an AI startup incubator, aiming to translate research breakthroughs into viable products for sectors like smart cities and healthcare. MBZUAI also often partners with government agencies on AI policy; for instance, it runs an AI ethics and governance training program with the UAE’s telecom regulator and IEEE, which by 2025 has certified dozens of public/private sector leaders in AI Ethics Assessment. Through such efforts, MBZUAI not only feeds the talent pipeline (ensuring UAE has AI scientists and not just AI users) but also embeds an ethics-by-design mindset in local AI projects.

Mubadala and MGX – The $100B AI Investment Vehicle: Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala (managing $284B+ assets) has taken a bold stance on AI. In 2024 it co-launched MGX, a state-owned AI investment firm, together with G42 as a founding partner. MGX’s mandate is astounding: it targets $100 billion AUM to back AI ventures globally. By 2025, MGX has started deploying capital in strategic projects that enhance both UAE’s and global AI infrastructure. One marquee initiative is the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership (GAIIP) MGX formed with BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), and Microsoft – announced in September 2024. This partnership plans to invest an initial $30 billion (eventually up to $100B) in new data centers and energy infrastructure to power AI, primarily in the United States. NVIDIA joined as an advisor to GAIIP, given its expertise in AI data centers (“AI factories”), ensuring that these investments truly advance the cutting edge. At its core, MGX is leveraging the UAE’s capital to become a global AI enabler – financing the computation backbone that AI needs. It’s notable that MGX is also making direct investments in AI companies; industry reports revealed that Mubadala and G42 (via MGX) were part of a $500 million investment into OpenAI in early 2023, and MGX has explored backing ventures like Elon Musk’s xAI. By backing top-tier AI labs and inviting co-investment from Western partners, the UAE is not only gaining financial returns but also strategic access – e.g., preferential access to AI technology, talent development opportunities, and a voice in global AI governance dialogues. The Chairman of MGX, UAE’s National Security Advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, emphasized that these efforts aim to “enhance American competitiveness in AI” while also benefiting the UAE – a clear indication that UAE seeks a win-win integration into the global AI supply chain rather than a decoupling.

M42 – AI Transforming Healthcare: Another standout UAE initiative is M42, formed via the 2022 merger of G42 Healthcare and Mubadala Health. M42 Health is a healthtech company powered by AI, operating hospitals, clinics, and medical research facilities with a data-driven approach. In January 2025, M42 announced a major restructuring into four specialized platforms to accelerate growth: a Global Patient Care platform (integrating its healthcare provider networks locally and abroad), an AI Life Sciences platform (focusing on AI-driven drug discovery and biotech), and two other divisions for national healthcare programs and population health (genomics, digital health). This structure gives each unit more autonomy to innovate while aligning with the group’s AI vision. M42’s Group CEO Hasan Jasem Al Nowais noted the company is actively pursuing acquisitions in the UK, US, and Asia to expand its footprint, armed with a strong balance sheet. The goal is to make M42 a global leader in AI-enabled healthcare – with Abu Dhabi as the hub connecting East and West.

In April 2025, during Abu Dhabi’s Global Health Week, M42 announced a partnership and investment in Juvenescence, a UK-based biotech focused on longevity therapeutics. This partnership will use AI to discover new drugs and therapies for age-related diseases, leveraging M42’s expertise in genomics and clinical trials alongside Juvenescence’s AI-driven drug discovery platforms. It aligns with M42’s newly launched AI Life Sciences Platform and underlines Abu Dhabi’s vision to be a global hub for AI-driven longevity science. By fast-tracking drug development (e.g., using AI to predict which compounds might successfully target diseases before lengthy lab work), M42 hopes to bring novel treatments to patients faster. Such initiatives also improve patient experience (the “CX” of healthcare) – for instance, AI models can personalize treatment plans or predict adverse effects, leading to more proactive and tailored patient care. M42 is additionally known for its work in pandemic response (it played a key role in UAE’s COVID-19 testing and vaccine trials via AI-driven analytics) and partnerships with global institutions (e.g., a collaboration with Cleveland Clinic to develop AI clinical applications was reported in late 2023). By 2025, M42’s message is clear: AI in healthcare is not theoretical – it’s being operationalized to improve outcomes for millions of patients, from AI-assisted diagnostics in hospitals to telehealth bots that triage patients in multiple languages.

Dubai Government – Pioneering Smart Governance and AI Adoption: Within the UAE, Dubai has been at the forefront of implementing AI in government services and regulation. In 2025, Dubai launched the first phase of the “Dubai Universal Blueprint for AI” (DUB.AI) – a comprehensive roadmap to infuse AI across all sectors of the city’s economy. A key project under this blueprint is the Dubai AI Campus at the DIFC Innovation Hub , opened in late 2024. This campus is the region’s largest cluster of AI companies and labs, offering state-of-the-art facilities and NVIDIA supercomputing resources for AI firms to develop and train models. The AI Campus provides generous incentives such as 90% subsidies on licensing fees and a regulatory sandbox that allows AI startups to experiment with new solutions under flexible rules. By early 2025, Phase 1 had attracted 75+ AI-focused companies into a 10,000 sq. ft space; Phase 2 aims to expand tenfold and host over 500 companies (and ~3,000 AI specialists) by 2028. Such physical co-location of AI talent is intended to spark innovation akin to Silicon Valley’s early days, but with a focus on local challenges and Arabic content needs.

Dubai also hosted the inaugural Dubai AI Week 2025 (21–25 April 2025) under the patronage of Crown Prince HH Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. This week-long festival featured an AI Retreat for policymakers, the Dubai Assembly for AI (bringing together 500+ global experts to discuss AI governance), a Global Prompt Engineering Championship, the Machines Can See computer vision conference, and the Dubai AI Festival. These events not only showcased the latest AI tech (with heavy participation from tech giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Oracle, etc., who are partners in Dubai’s AI initiatives) but also facilitated global dialogue on emerging topics like generative AI’s societal impact and agentic AI’s regulation. At Dubai AI Week, the Dubai Government Human Resources Department and MBR School of Government released a groundbreaking report on Generative AI Adoption Amongst Dubai Government Employees – one of the first studies of its kind in the world assessing a government workforce’s use of gen AI. The findings revealed that 94% of Dubai public sector employees are optimistic about AI’s impact on government operations, and 64% are already using generative AI at an intermediate or advanced level in their work. Common use cases include AI assistance for drafting emails, creating content, and conducting research. Importantly, 97% of those using AI reported tangible benefits like time savings, higher quality work, and boosted creativity. This indicates a high degree of receptivity and skill among government employees, likely bolstered by Dubai’s extensive digital training programs in recent years.

At the same time, the study did not shy away from challenges: employees cited concerns about inaccurate outputs, data privacy, and bias as top issues encountered with generative AI. Moreover, while most respondents agree on the need for ethical guidelines, 40% of employees were unaware of their organization’s AI ethics policies – a gap Dubai is keen to address through training. The Dubai government is using these insights to shape policies that encourage AI innovation responsibly. For example, off the back of this report, Dubai is developing comprehensive AI ethics training for all civil servants and has mandated each department to identify roles most “AI-exposed” (i.e., susceptible to automation) so they can upskill staff and mitigate job disruption fears. Such moves align with Dubai’s principle that government should be “AI-augmented, human-driven” – using AI to improve service delivery (from smart chatbots on the DubaiNow app to AI traffic management for smoother commutes) while ensuring the human touch remains in policy and citizen engagement.

In terms of customer experience, Dubai’s government services continue to rank among the world’s most innovative – now increasingly infused with AI. The city’s 24/7 RAHMA virtual assistant (within its unified customer app) uses AI to handle hundreds of thousands of queries in both Arabic and English, ranging from visa applications to utility bill payments, often reducing resolution times from days to instant answers. Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has piloted a generative AI-powered chatbot to assist riders with route planning and to handle feedback in multiple languages. Even in tourism marketing, Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism in 2025 launched an AI-driven campaign where generative models created personalized travel itineraries for prospective visitors based on their social media profiles – an ambitious blend of big data and AI creativity designed to enhance engagement. These efforts reflect how the Dubai Government views AI as a tool to enrich the CX of residents and customers of city services, making interactions more convenient, personalized, and efficient.

Saudi Arabia: SDAIA, SCAI, Aramco Digital, and HUMAIN Driving a National AI Agenda

Saudi Arabia, under its Vision 2030, has set equally (if not more) ambitious goals to lead in AI. The Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA), established in 2019, is the central orchestrator of Saudi’s national AI strategy – aiming to make the Kingdom one of the top 15 AI nations by 2030. In 2025, SDAIA | سدايا has been active on multiple fronts: policy, partnerships, and mega-projects. At a policy level, SDAIA is implementing the National Strategy for Data & AI, which includes initiatives for open data, talent development, and AI ethics frameworks. They have also hosted high-profile events like the Global AI Summit in Riyadh (2024) to signal Saudi’s commitment to global AI cooperation.

On the international partnership front, SDAIA has aligned with technology leaders to bolster Saudi’s AI ecosystem. In May 2025, during a Saudi-U.S. investment forum, SDAIA signed an MoU with AMD to explore building AI-focused data centers powered by AMD’s cutting-edge chips. This partnership aims to diversify Saudi’s silicon supply for AI and ensure the Kingdom has the robust computing infrastructure needed for AI growth. It’s part of SDAIA’s broader push to foster “silicon innovation” and reduce reliance on any single source for AI hardware, which ultimately could lead to data centers optimized for AI services across government, finance, and telecom sectors in the Kingdom. Earlier, SDAIA also partnered with IBM to establish a Generative AI Center of Excellence and launch the “ALLaM” (Arabic LLM) initiative. The ALLaM challenge – announced at the 2024 Global AI Summit – seeks to create a dominant Arabic language model by fine-tuning on Arabic knowledge, positioning it as a leading Arabic LLM on global platforms. This complements UAE’s Jais model; indeed, it suggests a healthy (and productive) competition in the region to advance Arabic NLP. If ALLaM achieves state-of-the-art status, it would fuel Arabic content applications from government document analysis to Arabic social media monitoring for sentiment – useful in everything from public services to marketing analytics.

Perhaps the most significant announcement came in May 2025, when NVIDIA and Saudi Arabia revealed a sweeping partnership to build “AI factories” – essentially giant GPU-driven computing hubs – that will catapult Saudi into the global AI elite. Central to this plan is HUMAIN, a new subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund (PIF) focused on AI. HUMAIN is making a massive investment to develop up to 500 MW of AI computing capacity in Saudi, installing hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA’s latest GPUs over the next five years. For scale, this would rank among the world’s largest AI computing installations (rivaling or exceeding those in the US and China), providing the raw horsepower to train advanced AI models domestically. The first phase alone involves deploying an 18,000-GPU supercomputer using NVIDIA’s cutting-edge Grace Hopper “GB300” chips and InfiniBand network. This “AI factory” will be a sovereign cloud for Saudi, enabling not just government use but also offering AI computing to local industries (energy, healthcare, education) so that even Saudi startups or researchers can train models without relying on overseas cloud services. Additionally, HUMAIN will implement NVIDIA’s Omniverse Cloud in the country to create digital twins – virtual simulations of real-world environments – supporting “physical AI” solutions like robotics and smart city planning. For example, before deploying AI-powered robots in manufacturing or autonomous vehicles in NEOM city, engineers can simulate them in Omniverse’s virtual world to test safety and efficiency.

This NVIDIA-Saudi collaboration also directly benefits SDAIA and Aramco Digital. Under the agreement, SDAIA will receive up to 5,000 NVIDIA GPUs to build its own “sovereign AI factory” servicing smart city initiatives (like NEOM and The Line) and train government and university scientists in developing physical and agentic AI models. It’s an effort to cultivate local expertise in areas like autonomous drones, intelligent infrastructure, and complex systems optimization – crucial as Saudi builds futuristic projects where AI will orchestrate transportation, energy use, and security. Meanwhile, Aramco Digital – the tech arm of oil giant Aramco – will establish an Engineering & Robotics Center of Excellence with NVIDIA, developing AI platforms for industry and collaborating with NVIDIA’s global network of startups. aramco digital’s mandate is to digitize and optimize aramco’s operations (from upstream exploration to downstream refining and retail) using advanced tech. In 2025, Aramco Digital has struck multiple partnerships: one with Qualcomm to leverage Aramco’s private 5G network for edge AI in Industrial IoT, connecting AI-powered devices like drones, sensors, and robots across vast oil facilities. Another exploratory project has Aramco Digital in talks with China’s CETC to create a joint Saudi-Chinese defense AI hub, tapping into AI for security and defense technologies. These partnerships show Aramco Digital’s dual strategy – collaborating with Western and Chinese tech – to import know-how and jointly develop AI solutions for industrial efficiency and national security.

For Saudi Arabia, energy and AI go hand in hand. AI not only helps improve oil production (predictive maintenance, reservoir modeling) but also diversifies the economy into high-tech. Notably, during U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi in May 2025, Aramco signed $90B worth of MoUs with U.S. companies, including major deals on AI and digital transformation. Among them, NVIDIA’s partnership and an Amazon/AWS strategic framework to collaborate on digital and lower-carbon initiatives using AI were prominent. These align with Saudi’s narrative of leveraging AI for both economic and sustainable development.

SCAI – Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence: To complement SDAIA’s public-sector role, the PIF established SCAI in 2021 as a national champion to develop AI solutions for priority sectors. By 2025, SCAI | سكاي has begun unveiling products and platforms that bring AI into Saudi businesses and daily life. For instance, in early 2024 SCAI launched SportNative, an AI-driven sports analytics suite designed to enhance player performance, optimize team strategy, and boost fan engagement in Saudi’s booming sports industry. (Saudi’s heavy investments – e.g., acquiring football stars and hosting global events – mean there’s a huge demand for sports tech). SportNative integrates data from games, wearables, and video feeds into a platform that provides insights for coaches, scouts, and even stadium managers. Its computer vision algorithms can, for example, analyze match footage to detect tactical patterns or evaluate a new player’s performance metrics, while its fan engagement module might personalize content for spectators. SCAI’s CCO noted this AI solution supports PIF’s goal of making Saudi a top global sports hub, by “elevating every facet of the sporting experience” – from on-field competition to the enjoyment of millions of fans. This is a vivid example of AI in CX: sports fans (customers) get more interactive, data-rich experiences (like smart replay apps or AI-curated highlights), improving their engagement with clubs and leagues.

SCAI is also active in government services AI. At the 2024 Global AI Summit, SCAI signed a partnership with digital government firm Elm to co-develop AI solutions for smarter public services. This collaboration focuses on applying LLMs, speech recognition, and computer vision to streamline how citizens interact with government – think Arabic AI chatbots that can process license applications or computer vision to automate municipal inspections. The partnership will also offer consulting to help government offices implement these AI tools effectively. By 2025, pilot projects under SCAI-Elm are reportedly underway in areas like intelligent call centers (where AI triages inquiries coming into government hotlines) and document processing (using AI to auto-extract information from paperwork for faster e-services). SCAI’s broader portfolio includes solutions like SCAI Monitor (an AI platform for data analytics and surveillance, perhaps used in finance or security) and SCAI Motion (likely focusing on smart city or mobility AI, given Saudi’s interest in autonomous transport). PIF’s massive “giga-projects” – such as the NEOM smart city, Red Sea tourism project, and others – are essentially living labs for SCAI’s innovations, as these projects are embedding AI from the ground up for infrastructure, hospitality, and government administration.

Crucially, Saudi Arabia is ensuring these efforts tie into a unified vision. Prince Mohammed bin Salman in late 2024 announced Project “Transcendence”, a $100B program to develop Saudi’s AI ecosystem with support from global tech companies. This includes constructing large-scale cloud data centers, funding AI startups, and training Saudi youth in AI skills by the thousands. For example, Google is co-investing in Saudi’s cloud region and providing expertise to local developers as part of this program. Furthermore, Saudi and UAE have recognized the value of collaboration alongside competition. In 2025, there have been instances of co-investment – such as UAE’s MGX and Saudi’s Sanabil Investments fund jointly investing in an autonomous vehicle AI startup in Europe, or both countries teaming up with international partners like Oracle and OpenAI on initiatives to deploy generative AI solutions in the Gulf. This marks a maturation of the MENA AI landscape: moving from siloed national projects to regional alliances that can create synergies (shared data, research, and standards) – an important development given the relatively smaller pool of Arabic AI experts worldwide.

Conclusion and Outlook

By the end of 2025, AI’s trajectory is one of both exhilarating progress and sobering responsibility. On the technical front, generative AI models have become workhorses in enterprises, boosting productivity in content creation, coding, and customer engagement. The rise of agentic AI hints at a future where autonomously acting AI systems could transform operations in every sector – a prospect already visible in early implementations of AI assistants and industrial robots with increasing decision powers. Meanwhile, the pursuit of AGI continues to drive heated discussions, investments, and precautionary measures in equal measure.

What sets 2025 apart is how geopolitics and cross-regional collaborations have come to the forefront in AI. The MENA region’s emergence – through the UAE’s and Saudi Arabia’s visionary initiatives – adds a new “third pole” to the AI world, one that is investing heavily and also addressing the cultural and linguistic underrepresentation in AI (e.g., Arabic). The UAE’s approach of leveraging sovereign funds (Mubadala’s MGX) to integrate with global tech and invest in infrastructure, and Saudi’s approach of coupling AI development with national transformation projects (NEOM, Vision 2030 goals), offer alternative models of AI development that differ from Silicon Valley’s startup-driven innovation or China’s state-directed approach. For businesses and marketing leaders, this means more diverse AI solutions will be available. For instance, a global company aiming to improve customer experience in the Middle East can deploy an Arabic LLM like Jais or ALLaM to power its regional chatbot, knowing it’s been developed with local context in mind – something that greatly enhances CX authenticity and effectiveness.

We also see that AI in 2025 is not just about technology; it’s about strategy, policy, and ecosystem-building. Companies are learning that to fully capitalize on AI (whether for marketing personalization or operational efficiency), they need a data strategy, the right talent, and governance in place – lessons underscored by the Dubai government study where even tech-savvy employees highlighted the need for training and ethical guidelines. The trend is toward “augmented workforces”: retaining human creativity and judgment while offloading drudgery and analysis to AI. In customer-facing domains, this manifests as AI tools that assist human agents (for example, suggesting responses or analyzing customer sentiment in real-time) rather than replace them outright, thus blending efficiency with empathy.

Looking ahead, we can expect more convergence of AI developments across borders. The partnerships like G42-Mistral, SDAIA-NVIDIA, and Aramco-Qualcomm are likely just the start of a wave of cross-border AI ventures, as no single country has all the pieces (data, talent, compute, capital) in perfect abundance. AI regulation will also mature – with the EU’s AI Act set to influence global standards and countries like the UAE and KSA possibly creating their own regulations or certification regimes to ensure AI solutions (especially those affecting consumers) are safe and fair. For instance, it wouldn’t be surprising if, in the near future, Dubai mandates AI disclosure in customer service (“AI may assist you in this chat”) or Saudi requires audits of AI used in high-stakes areas like recruitment or lending to prevent bias.

In summary, 2025 has been a pivotal year where AI truly went global: it became more multilingual and culturally aware, more embedded in everyday business, and more collaboratively developed across nations. Executives on LinkedIn and beyond are witnessing AI’s transition from a trendy experiment to a mission-critical asset – akin to the internet’s shift in the early 2000s. Whether it’s enhancing marketing campaigns with AI-generated content, delivering hyper-personalized customer journeys through AI analytics, or reengineering operations with autonomous agents, the opportunities are immense. But seizing them requires navigating new challenges – ethical use, workforce impact, and forging the right partnerships (sometimes even with erstwhile competitors).

One thing is clear: the countries and companies that proactively embrace AI, guided by clear strategy and values, will lead in the next decade’s digital economy. As we’ve seen with the MENA region’s bold moves, late adopters risk falling behind. In the words of UAE’s leadership: the goal is not just to use AI, but to be among those shaping its future. And 2025 is proving that around the world – from Silicon Valley boardrooms to Riyadh and Dubai strategic councils – the future of AI is being shaped now.